LAHORE: Since January 2018, 52 people have died in the custody of Punjab police in Pakistan’s eastern province- a majority of them due to torture, according to a report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. And yet, in the history of the 200,000 strong provincial force, no police officer has ever been convicted of torturing a suspect.
The Punjab police has a long history of conducting brutal interrogations to coerce confessions. A human rights law firm, Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), studied nearly 2,000 complaints filed against Punjab police officers between 2006-2012 from Faisalabad, just one district in the province and the country’s third most populous city. Of these cases, 76 percent showed conclusive signs of abuse.
Police lockup in Lahore. Sept. 20, 2019. Photograph by Benazir Shah (AN)
But the culture of custodial torture, despite having a maximum penalty of a 10-year imprisonment, continues to thrive with no legal accountability for those in uniform.
“The maximum action is dismissal from service,” Inam Ghani, the additional inspector general of operations in Punjab and the force’s official spokesperson, told Arab News. “I don’t have the data right now [of convictions], but we take departmental action when such a case comes up,” he said.
In August, Salahuddin Ayubi, a small-time thief who was mentally disabled, was picked up for stealing ATM cards, and later died in police custody. A forensics report confirmed fatal torture marks on his body, but police officials continue to deny malpractice.
A camera installed in a lockup at a police station in Lahore. Sept. 20, 2019. Photograph by Benazir Shah
“According to the initial post-mortem report there was no fracture in the body and the vitals were fine,” Ghani said. “Okay, I agree that when he was caught, there was some roughing up because he was faking being mute, which the police videotaped to show the public.”
“In cases like that of Salahuddin, the police has more information than the general public or the media,” he said.
But the video, which had shown Ayubi in great and visible pain, triggered public outrage on social media, leading to the suspension of three police officers but no trial and no conviction.
In the same month, an anti-corruption unit in Punjab accidentally stumbled upon an off-the-books interrogation center run by police, where seven detainees were illegally detained and tortured.
Inam Ghani, Additional Inspector General Operations, Punjab, at his office in Lahore. Sept. 17, 2019. Photograph by Benazir Shah (AN)
Ghani, who has been in the police service for over 30 years, insists that such torture cells are rare.
“We only found one in Lahore. We think it may have been set up in reaction to our new initiative,” he said, referring to the installation of cameras in all 830 police cells in Punjab in the last four months. Since then, he adds, there have been no illegal detentions or reports of torture.
But the force may not be looking hard enough.
Reading about private torture cells brought back bitter memories for Mohammad Nawaz, a clerk in the local government in Faisalabad. In 2016, he said he was held in a similar cell seven times over a minor land dispute.
“Even today, at least six of these secret torture cells exist in my area. All in private homes,” he said. Arab News was unable to independently verify his claim.
But for the police, torture is an open secret, and one reason is that they are never held accountable, Andalib Aziz of the JPP told Arab News.
Police torture, she said, was difficult to prove since the prisoner was in the custody of the police. And even if the complaint reached a local court, most people did not have legal representation or were unaware of their rights. Others are afraid the police would seek them out for revenge.
“They feel so pressurized by the system that they choose to stay silent,” she said.
Through the bars, a camera installed in the lockup of a police station in Lahore. Sept. 20, 2019. Photograph by Benazir Shah (AN)
And the system has so far internalized police brutality, that torture now has its own lexicon.
Cheera, Kursi, Manji- code words that involve different acts of abuse. The torture includes suspension from the roof, crushing the body, sleep deprivation, burning and sexual violence, the JPP noted in a 2012 report.
The problem is the over militarization of the police,” Ghani admitted. “This means that we treat the police only as a force, making it very crime-centric.”
During the nine month training period after recruitment into the force, the bulk of police training is focused on how to use firearms.
In an attempt to break from the past, Ghani said, work on police reform had begun, with repatriation plans including the hiring of 30 psychologists for the force and training members better in crime-scene management and evidence collection.
The process of promotion is also being overhauled. Previously, cops were assessed simply on the number of cases they solved, which provided strong motivation for forcing confessions and closing cases by any means necessary.
But similar reforms were promised in the past too.
A police officer monitors the feed from the cameras installed at a lockup in Lahore. Sept. 20, 2019. Photograph by Benazir Shah (AN)
In 1999, a complaint authority was to be established to hear complaints against police officers. In 2002, the Police Act was passed to keep on-duty high-handedness in check. More recently, in 2016, attempts were made to bring in technology to update the force. None bore results.
One problem, say human rights activists, is that Pakistan has yet to properly criminalize torture, because the law does not define the word.
To fill this loophole, Pakistan’s newly-elected ruling party drafted the Anti-Torture Bill last December but it is yet to be tabled in Parliament.
Even if the bill is bulldozed to law, citizens, at least in Faisalabad, are skeptical of its implementation.
Front desk of a police station in Lahore. Sept. 20, 2019. Photograph by Benazir Shah (AN)
These are people like Liaquat Ali, who spent the last two years trying to secure the release of his teenage son who was picked up by police. Officers had arrived in search of Ali’s older son who had eloped with a girl from his village. When they couldn’t find him, the police took his younger brother instead.
For eight months, they kept him in custody without charge, during which time the boy said he was routinely abused. Last month, Ali was able to secure his son’s bail and had a police complaint registered against three police officers. All three remain in office.
“If the Punjab police really wants to reform itself, it can,” Ali told Arab News over telephone.
“But they won’t,” he continued. “Because they enjoy the power they have over poor people like us and the fear they invoke.”
