PESFAWAR (Pajhwok): As many as 129 illegal female Afghan nationals with 178 children have been hailed in Pakistan’s southeastern Sindh province.
A provincial minister said this on Friday in reaction to widespread criticism sparked by a photograph of Afghan minors in jail that recently went viral on social media.
The 178 children were not under arrest, insisted Sindh Information Minister Sharjeel Memon. He confirmed 129 Afghan women were imprisoned in the province.
Memon told reporters in Karachi: “Under the law, children below the age of seven years may be allowed to stay with their mothers in jail. Where will the children go when their fathers are also in jail?”
Of the 129 female detainees from Afghanistan, 75 were under-trial prisoners and 54 sentenced to two months in jail, the minister explained.
Memon promised the 54 females would be deported to their country after their release, along with their children.
He showed reporters the video of a women’s jail in Karachi, where children are seen reading books and playing at a school inside the prison.
But Lawyer Samar Abbas claimed he himself had taken the pictures. A resident of Karachi, he told Dawn: “We stand by the tweet. The picture and the tweet are authentic.”
“As I mentioned in the tweet, I met these children when they were brought to the city court’s lock up, commonly known as Bakhshi Khana,” the lawyer maintained.
Earlier, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Pakistan tweeted that it was “extremely concerned to see images and reports of the arrest and detention of Afghan refugees in Sindh province, particularly Karachi.”
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