Kaplan Herald: Rajkot: Friday, January 12, 2018.
A shepherd
from Khavda taluka of Kutch, lodged in a Pakistan jail since 2008, cannot
return to India even a year after his prison term ended because his nationality
is yet to be verified by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), revealed a reply
to a right to information (RTI) query.
Ismail
Alimamad Samma (51), a resident of Nana Dinara village some 50km from the
Indo-Pakistan border in Kutch, had gone missing since August 2008 after he
strayed into the Pakistan side while grazing cattle, said Jatin Desai, national
general secretary of Mumbai-based NGO, Pakistan-India Peoples‘ Forum for Peace
and Democracy. Desai, who filed an RTI on this issue in August last year with
the Ministry of External Affairs, recently received a reply to it from the
Indian High Commission in Pakistan.
“Samma served
five-year jail term on charges of espionage. His prison term ended in October
2016. But in a recent RTI reply we came to know that government of India has
still not verified his identity despite him getting consular access in 2014.
While case of Kulbhushan Jadhav is taken on priority, poor people like Samma
are suffering because of government red-tapism,” said Desai. Due to lack of
nationality verification on the part of the MHA, he has not yet been
repatriated, he added.
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