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| Families worry for Pak students held in UK |
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Monday, April 13, 2009
By Rahimullah Yusufzai
PESHAWAR: The families of three Pakistani students arrested in UK on suspicion of involvement in a terrorist plot have stepped forward in three cities of NWFP and declared that the detained men were innocent.
Nasrullah Jan Khattak, the father of Abid Naseer who was named in sections of the British media as the ringleader of the group of 11 Pakistanis detained in northwest England last Wednesday, told The News that his son had no link with militants and terrorists. “My son has a beard and prays five times a day. Ours is a religious-minded family but this doesn’t mean that my son is part of a terrorist cell,” he stressed.
Khattak said the British media had wrongly reported that Abid Naseer belonged to the tribal areas. “We belong to Karak district in NWFP but I shifted to Peshawar in 1987 and started doing business as a property dealer, government contractor and builder,” he explained. He said his son had studied at the Islamia College, Peshawar and was a good cricketer.
He said Abid Naseer went to England two years ago to acquire a degree in IT from a university in Manchester. “His student visa was going to expire in September 2009. He told us that he prayed at the Al-Falah Mosque in Cheetham Hill in Manchester,” Khattak said.
He said he tried calling his son in England on Friday but got no reply. “I was concerned as I had read news about the arrest of Pakistani students in UK. Finally I got to know from the newspaper that Abid Naseer has been arrested on suspicion of being part of a terror plot. It was unbelievable,” he recalled.
In Dera Ismail Khan, the father and uncles of Muhammad Ramzan Mahsud, who was among the arrested Pakistani students, insisted that Ramzan Mahsud had gone to England for studies and not for exploding bombs. His father Hazrat Ali and his uncle Dr Akbar Ali, along with a relative Ejaz Khan, who is an executive engineer with a government department, came to the Dera Press Club to talk to reporters and argue that Ramzan Mahsud was innocent. “I was paying for my son’s education in England for the last two years. He was to complete his studies in six months but his arrest could destroy his career,” his father lamented.
Ramzan Mahsud’s family members were critical of the Pakistan government, particularly the foreign ministry, for its inability to plead the case of the arrested students.
They asked the government to make efforts to secure their release. In Tank, a southern district in NWFP which serves as a gateway to South Waziristan, the father, brother and cousins of Abdul Wahab Burki held an emergency press conference to express concern over his arrest in Liverpool and demand his release.
Malik Khan Mohammad Burki said that his 26-year old son had left for UK in the first week of October 2008 to study for a masters’ degree in computer sciences at the Liverpool University. “My son Abdul Wahab Burki and none of my family members have any link with terrorists. We belong to the Burki tribe, which has the highest literacy ratio of 98 percent in the whole of the tribal areas,” he argued.
Abdul Wahab Burki’s brother Gulzar Jan Burki, cousins Mohammad Alam Burki, OmarBurki, Fayyaz Khatir Burki and some Burki tribal elders also attended the press conference in Tank.
Meanwhile, there were reports about the arrest of another Pakistani student named Faraz, who belonged to Bannu. Sources in Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan said Faraz was allowed by the British authorities to make a phone call to his family in Bannu on Sunday. He was quoted as saying that preliminary investigations by the British Police had shown that the arrested students were innocent. Faraz told his family that they would be released in the coming days.
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