A PITIFUL parade of sickly and emaciated prisoners - one of them clutching a full colostomy bag to his side - in a Pakistani court this week has thrown a rare shaft of light on to the dark arts of the country's powerful security establishment. Seven men appeared in the Supreme Court on Monday after Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhury threatened the Military Intelligence and Inter Services Intelligence chiefs with contempt of court for violating orders to produce the detainees from one of the organisation's notorious underground jails.
After months of stalling by the agencies, who initially denied they had the men in custody, they relented the same day Chief Justice Chaudhury indicted Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on contempt for failing to reopen corruption cases.
Relatives sitting in the Islamabad courtroom sobbed as the missing prisoners - who once numbered 11 - limped in.
They were arrested in 2007 and 2008 on suspicion of involvement in four terror attacks, including an attempted strike on a plane carrying the country's former military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, but they were acquitted of all charges in 2010.
The men fitted the state profile of terror suspects in the sense they were all highly religious and many of them had links to Islamabad's radical Red Mosque.
The Lahore High Court upheld their acquittal and ordered their release, but relatives say the prisoners were abducted by intelligence forces from Rawalpindi's Adiala Jail in May 2010 before they could be set free. Four prisoners have since died in custody - the ISI says of "natural causes".
Despite legal petitions from family members, their whereabouts was unknown until last month when the court demanded the men be handed to civil authorities.
"These people have been languishing in torture cells for over 1 1/2 years," the lawyer for the men, Tariq Asad, told the court, adding three of the seven were suffering kidney failure, and the rest chronic diseases.
"Either take our life or let us go," pleaded 23-year-old Abdul Majid on Monday, who cried as he was led from the court clutching his colostomy bag.
"I was a businessman. No one has ever explained to us why we are being held."
An editorial in the Dawn newspaper days later called the spectacle a "rare public manifestation of the lack of humanity of this opaque system in which perceived troublemakers are picked up and held without trial".
"The sight was a reminder of the horror of a parallel system of justice that normally operates without questions being asked," the editorial said.
Every Pakistani knows stories of the country's secret prisons: underground cells in which hundreds of people, held on suspicion alone, are detained and sometimes tortured for years.
The lucky ones are released, destined to a life spent in mute terror of being re-arrested.
Others do not survive, and it is left to grieving relatives - who often have spent years searching for their disappeared - to collect brutalised bodies from roadside ambulances.
Such was the fate of Roheela Bibi, who lost three sons to Pakistan's shadow prisons in 2008. Three weeks ago she received an anonymous phone call informing her that one son, Abdul Saboor, was in Peshawar hospital. Before she could reach there the phone rang again.
"The same person called again to tell us my brother expired and we should collect his body," her eldest son Abdul Qudoos said this week. The body was left in a parked ambulance near a service station, pock-marked with signs of torture.
Bibi - who campaigned tirelessly for the release of her acquitted sons - survived the shock of one son's death in custody. But her family says the sight of another two scarred and terrified sons in court, including Abdul Majid, was more than Bibi could bear.
She died of a heart attack the next day.
The claims of torture made by the families of the eleven men have been denied by ISI lawyers as "wild, diabolical and vicious allegations against a superior agency of the country".
It says the men were abducted by militants and that it rescued them during anti-Taliban operations. But it has until March to explain under what law it is holding them.
The Supreme Court, often accused of acting at the military's behest, has drawn praise for its actions this week.
Amina Masood Janjua, who founded the Defence of Human Rights Pakistan movement when her own husband was snatched, says she is buoyed by the court's actions. Along with other relatives of missing people, she is staging a sit-in outside parliament to press the court into ordering the release or prosecution of an estimated 1050 people being detained without charge
But the country's human rights commissioner, Asma Jahangir, says there is little cause for congratulation in Pakistan's judiciary finally acting against such abuses.
"While state actors who indulge in illegal activities such as torture are not brought to account then there is no deterrent," she told The Weekend Australian.
"We can all sit there and cry with these relatives, but in two weeks there will be another case."
The true test, she says, will be when - or if - the Supreme Court deals with the "wider question of how intelligence agencies operate in this country".
Pakistan Court Reveals Glimpse Of Illegal Prison Torture
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