Pakistan releases 48 Indian prisoners

KARACHI: Pakistan released yesterday 48 Indian fishermen, 10 of them teenagers, as a “goodwill gesture” following a visit by the Indian foreign minister S. M. Krishna.
In a sign of thawing relations, Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart Hina Rabbani Khar last week inked an historic agreement to ease visa restrictions between the two countries.
The release of fishermen is part of an understanding between the nuclear-armed rivals to free citizens who mistakenly stray into each other’s waters.
“We have released 48 Indian fishermen from Malir jail in Karachi as a goodwill gesture,” deputy inspector-general prisons of southern Sindh province, Nusrat Mangan, told AFP.
He said 32 Indian fishermen were still in Pakistani prisons. “They will also be released after our authorities receive a clearance from the Indian government,” he said. Nazeer Husain Shah, superintendent of the jail, said the released prisoners included 10 teenage boys. The Indians were presented with flowers and gifts, then bussed to the eastern city of Lahore, from where they would cross the Wagah border.
Officials said they expect India would reciprocate the Pakistani gesture by releasing more than 200 Pakistani fishermen languishing in Indian jails.
“We expect our neighbors will show the similar spirit and release the Pakistani prisoners from their jails,” Ayaz Soomro, law minister of the Sindh province said.
Pakistan and India frequently seize each other’s fishermen, accusing them of violating their respective maritime boundaries in the Arabian Sea.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence in 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which is divided by a heavily militarized Line of Control and which both countries claim in full.
Last year they resumed their tentative peace process, which collapsed after militants from Pakistan killed 166 people in Mumbai in November 2008.
Meanwhile, a car bomb targeting security forces in a market area in northwest Pakistan yesterday killed 10 people and wounded more than 40, officials said. An explosives-laden vehicle exploded near a convoy of security forces in a market in Parachinar town of Kurram tribal district, senior administration official Sahibzada Muhammad Anis told AFP. He said 10 people died but the toll was expected to increase because 40 had been wounded.
Kurram is one of seven districts in Pakistan’s tribal belt on the Afghan border that is home to Taleban and Al-Qaeda strongholds. Washington has dubbed the area the most dangerous region of the world.
“The car detonated as a security convoy passed by in the Turi Market” of the town dominated by the minority Shiite Muslim community, Anis said. It was not immediately clear if it was a suicide attack, he said adding that an investigation was underway.