 LAHORE: A police contingent laid into a gathering of women and men organised by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the Joint Action Committee for Peoples Rights which had congregated on the Main Boulevard in Gulberg to stage a "mixed-marathon" to test the enlightened-moderation" claims of the government, and swept about 40 of them to the police station.
| That worked well, didn't it? |
Asma Jahangir, the chairperson of the HRCP, and Iqbal Haider, the secretary-general, were among those who were brutally dragged into police vans and held for a couple of hours at local police stations. The police action against the congregation was taken on the orders of the Lahore Nazim, Mian Amir Mahmood, who claimed that he had disallowed the rally after receiving "negative reports" from the police. In turn, the police claimed that it had received information of an impending assault on the mixed rally by activists of the Shabab-e-Milli, the youth wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami. But eyewitness reports confirmed that a handful of such activists arrived on the scene only after the police had dragged away the women and broken up the event. |