Rawalpindi, Sep 18 (IANS) Torturing of suspects has become a routine practice in this city with 39 such cases – and four deaths – reported in the first eight months of 2007, an investigation by a leading newspaper has revealed.
“Brutality in police culture is so deeply ingrained it appears no injection of reforms will ever be able to civilise the keepers of law,” Dawn reported Tuesday.
“In a matter of just eight months since January, 39 cases of torture have been documented against the Rawalpindi police. Four of these unfortunate victims are no more in this world to tell what happened to them.
“Torture is routine practice at all places of detention to extract confessions. It makes the process of inquiry easy and as long as judges and magistrates admitted confessions made under torture the practice is not going to go,” the newspaper said.
The case report compiled by Dawn based on medical autopsy results, testimonies and interviews with victims and doctors shows that the “law seems unable to bring the culprits to book.
“The savagery goes on unchecked. Hardly any of the perpetrators is punished.”
Most of the victims were arrested in campaigns against common crime and were tortured to obtain confessions. They were tortured in local police stations, often in interrogation rooms and sometimes taken to undisclosed places.
“In the rare instances when the victims have stood up and sought recourse to legal defence they have faced harassment, intimidation and obstruction by the police through such common tactics as bringing cooked up charges against relatives and locking up sympathisers,” the newspaper said.
According to some testimonies, lawyers are not allowed during questioning of suspects in detention, relatives are not informed about their detention, and in the jail, convicts do the torturing on behalf of jail authorities.
“There is no independent mechanism to investigate such abuses and it has created a serious accountability vacuum in which torture methods flourish,” Dawn noted.
A senior doctor who had often been a member of medical boards and had carried out medical examinations of several victims of police torture told the newspaper that the most common methods of torture included “flogging with whips, beating with batons and machetes and caning the soles of the feet, inserting rods in sensitive parts, squeezing of testes.
“Mental torture was inflicted by denying food, water and medical treatment,” the doctor added.