Runaway schoolgirl attends human rights rally

A 12-year-old Scottish girl at the middle of an international custody battle attended a rally in the Pakistani capital today to condemn alleged secret detentions by domestic spy agencies, a day after a court allowed her to temporarily live there with her father.

Pakistani human rights activists have been holding small protest rallies for the past few months, demanding the release of dozens of men believed to have been clandestinely snatched by the government.

Relatives say the prisoners have been held by powerful military-backed spy agencies since as early as 2004 for their suspected links with militants, with no opportunities for a hearing or to contact their families.

Today Molly Campbell, also known as Misbah Iram Ahmed Rana, joined dozens of activists in Islamabad to voice concern over such detentions.

“I know how people feel when they lose families. I know how people suffer,” she told journalists at the rally.

Earlier, Asma Jehangir, chairwoman of the private Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, told the rally that agents had turned scores of people over to the Pakistan army after arresting them in recent years.

“Most of such detainees are still missing, and we are worried about their well being,” she said.

Jehangir said the families of the missing people were also suffering because they had no information on the whereabouts of their dear ones.

“We demand that all such detainees should be freed,” she said.

The demand came more than a week after the government told the Pakistan Supreme Court that 10 of 41 men on a list of people suspected of being held by intelligence agencies have returned home.

The government reply came in response to a complaint from the local, independent Defence of Human Rights group.

Pakistan is a key ally of the United States in its war on terror, and its security agencies have arrested more than 700 al Qaida suspects, including some associates of Osama bin Laden, since the September 11 2001, attacks in the US.

But critics say the spy agencies have gone too far.

Today the group’s chief co-ordinator, Khalid Khawaja, accused spy agencies of holding hundreds of people without any reason.

He also said his group would not allow Pakistan’s government to deport Molly Campbell to Britain against her wishes.

She arrived in the eastern city of Lahore in August without permission from her Scottish mother Louise Campbell, who has been fighting a legal battle for her custody.

On Friday, the Supreme Court suspended an earlier court order that the girl be handed over to British authorities so she could be returned to her mother.

The girl’s father, Sajad Ahmed Rana, and Campbell married in a Muslim ceremony in Glasgow in 1984. They had two sons and two daughters before divorcing in 2001.