“Naheem Hussain was 19 when he was arrested in 2004, his friend Rehan Zaman was 21. Reprieve didn’t know about their case until October 2008, when the Foreign Office contacted us. Naheem and Rehan are from Birmingham. During a visit to Pakistan in 2004 they were arrested after two members of Naheem’s family were killed during a dispute over land. They were beaten and tortured by the police for two weeks, and all of the scant evidence against them was extracted under torture. Six years later, they are still awaiting trial.
“The thing that struck me meeting them is how hard this is on them emotionally. Rehan is clearly very depressed and struggling with the reality of spending all
that time in prison. He told me that he’d rather just go to the gallows than put his family through this for much longer. The gallows are right in the middle of the prison so there are no illusions about what they’re facing.
He’s acutely aware that this is a huge burden on his family. His dad has moved out to Pakistan so he can visit him, so of course that means his dad doesn’t see his other sons or his own wife. Rehan doesn’t mix with other prisoners and he’s become very forgetful. He reads (I took him a copy of Men’s Health magazine) and prays, and plays badminton when he can.
“The prison holds about 300 men at the moment, though it was built for 150. There are no beds and the prisoners have trouble getting any sleep. Naheem sleeps in a cell built for one person, but there are 10 or 12 men in there. If you roll to one side someone will stretch out and fill the space you were in so you can’t roll back. They’re really like sardines.
Naheem was also very low, and clearly misses his family. I’ve been up to Birmingham a few times and I’ve got to know them quite well – it was painful to realise that I’ve had much more contact with Naheem’s family recently than he has. He liked hearing me talk about them but I think it was also quite upsetting for him.
They’re still feeling the physical effects of the two weeks of torture they suffered when they were arrested. Rehan’s fingernails have grown back and the cigarette burns have healed, while Naheem is obviously still in pain. He has headaches and pain in his knees, and he described a feeling he gets of hundreds of spiders running up and down inside his legs.
“When Naheem was arrested, the police said they would hang him from the tree outside the station. Then they stamped on him, kicked him and tied him to a chair. They put boards under and over his knees and tightened them together with rope. We believe this is what causes the pain six years later, but we haven’t been able to get a proper medical exam for him yet.
Naheem told me that Reprieve investigator Sultana Noon is the one who had found out everything about their case, and he said thank you over and over again to us. He said that because Reprieve was at the most recent hearing, the judge was more careful – he realised that people are monitoring the case and he behaved accordingly.
“They’re incredibly frustrated now. They turn up for a hearing every two weeks or so and the hearing gets cancelled. Either a lawyer won’t turn up, or the witnesses won’t turn up, or the judge won’t turn up… One time we managed to get everyone there and it was in the summer and the electricity went so there was no air conditioning and they
all went home. They get cancelled for a thousand different reasons. That’s been going on for almost five years.
“The only evidence against Naheem and Rehan was extracted under torture. They were tortured into saying they would identify the murder weapons, then they were taken
to a graveyard where the police said, ‘Is this where you dropped the weapons?’ and nudged them to say yes, and then the police produced two guns. Then, rather brilliantly, a crime lab in Lahore did ballistics examinations on these guns and they didn’t match the shells that were found at the scene of the crime. I have no idea why the police would get ballistics testing on guns they’d planted, but it’s fantastic for us that they did. Naheem and Rehan have their theories but I don’t think they know exactly what happened in this case. They just know that they’re innocent and that someone set them up.
“The Dadyal police have done this plenty of times before. We know other people who have been through Dadyal police station and been tortured. We’re working on a project to try and find more people from Dadyal who’ve been tortured.
There’s a doctor in the prison who just prescribes aspirin or paracetamol for everything. One of the things we want to do is get a proper evaluation of Naheem and Rehan, both physically because of the torture they sustained and a psychiatric evaluation.
We’re working to build a better relationship with the prison governors, so we can get medical help in to the prison for Naheem
and Rehan, and we’re slowly but surely improving the legal representation that they have in Pakistan, so we can make some progress on their case. They’ve been locked up for six years without trial, and it’s time they came home.”
Read more about Naheem and Rehan at www.reprieve.org.uk/naheemhussainrehanzaman
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