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********** PAKISTAN COURT EXTENDS DETENTION OF KARACHI SURVIVOR Christian Eyewitness Kept in ‘Protective Custody’ by Barbara G. Baker

ISTANBUL, October 8 (Compass) — One of two eyewitnesses to Karachi’s execution-style massacre on September 25 has been detained for two more weeks by court order, pending security police investigations into the still unsolved attack.

A district bench of the Sindh High Court today extended until October 22 police “protective custody” of 27-year-old Robin Peranditta by Pakistan’s Criminal Investigation Agency (CIA).

Robin Shareef, the other survivor of the shooting which left seven Christians dead, suffered critical wounds and lies unconscious in a Karachi hospital.

Peranditta collapsed under police interrogation a few hours after the terrorist attack on the office where he worked as an errand boy and watchman. After brief treatment at a local hospital, he has been held at the CIA center in Karachi’s Sadar district since the attack.

Although severely beaten by the unidentified gunmen, Peranditta was not shot when they broke into the downtown Karachi offices of the Institute for Peace and Justice (IPJ), a Christian welfare organization serving the massive port city’s poor.

The provincial court ruling to extend Peranditta’s detention came in response to a constitutional petition filed on October 4 by Joseph Francis, coordinator of the Lahore-based Center for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS).

According to Noor Naz Agha, the Karachi attorney who filed the petition, security authorities are obliged by the law to either charge the Christian survivor as an accused suspect, or release him.

However, Sindh Advocate General Raja Qureshi countered that Peranditta had seen the murderers and his life was in danger. “So they would not produce him before the court today due to security reasons,” Agha told Compass by telephone from Karachi.

Robin is not under arrest, according to them,” Agha said. “He is under protective custody, for security of his life.”

But after Agha was allowed to meet privately with Peranditta today, she said her client is “very afraid” to tell police investigators what he knows about the attack. In addition to the heavy psychological stress of repeated interrogations, he has been physically mistreated while under police custody.

Francis, who met with Peranditta today at the Sadar CIA center, verified that he saw cigarette burns all over the detained Christian’s body, “on both sides of his chest, his knees and his arms,” he said.

By order of the two presiding justices, Francis and lawyers representing Peranditta are now to be allowed to meet with him alone for 30 minutes at a time, without any police present.

According to Karachi police chief Kamal Shah, Peranditta has made several contradictory statements and continues to withhold important information from crime investigators. Local media reports claimed he has been subjected at least twice to lie detector tests, both of which he failed.

Anonymous police sources have even hinted that Peranditta would be charged “soon” as a suspected collaborator in the massacre.

In a private meeting with his lawyer today, Peranditta admitted his statements to the police had been contradictory. “I don’t want to tell anything to them,” he said, “because if I tell them, I might be killed.”

For this reason, Agha said, she will make a formal request before the October 22 hearing that Peranditta’s eyewitness statements be recorded “before the courts, not just before the police.”

Under court order, Peranditta’s wife Elizabeth was also allowed a private visit with her husband today. The couple has four small children.

Local church sources confirm that Robin Shareef, 24, has undergone major surgery for severe head injuries sustained in the September 25 attack. Still unconscious, he remains in an intensive care ward of Karachi’s Aga Khan Hospital.

Two More Attacks

Meanwhile, two more Christian institutions in Pakistan have been targeted by violence since the Karachi attack.

On Sunday, September 29, a crude bomb exploded close to the wall of a small interdenominational Christian prayer hall in Baluchistan province. Despite partial damage to the building’s outer wall, no one was wounded at the remote village church in Kohlu, where “Dawn” newspaper reported “a few Catholic worshippers were inside the building” at the time.

On October 4, two unidentified men on a motorcycle threw a hand grenade at the main entrance of the Christian Mission Hospital in Bannu, just 30 miles from the Afghan border in Pakistan’s rugged tribal region. The explosion, which barely missed two police guards who had walked back into the compound minutes before, shattered hospital windows but caused no injuries.

The Karachi massacre was the last of five deadly attacks targeting Pakistan’ s Christian minority in the past 12 months. A total of 39 have been killed and 75 wounded in the anti-Christian assaults, blamed on Muslim extremists exacting revenge upon Christians for the Pakistan government’s backing of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, seen by many as an assault against Islam.

But when Pakistan Information Minister Nisar Menom visited New York last month with President Pervez Musharraf’s entourage, he insisted Christians were not under threat, the “Chicago Tribune” reported on September 16.

“For God’s sake, stop twisting trivial and internal matters of the country into a propaganda campaign,” he told a Pakistani-American Christian. In fact, he said, Pakistan was a “paradise” for its religious minority citizens.

END

********** Copyright 2002 Compass Direct

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