Indian fishermen complain of ill-treatment in Pak jails

The Indian fishermen released by Pakistan recently have complained that they were ill-treated in the jails there and the allowances earned by them were pocketed by the prison staff.
45 fishermen arrested by Pakistan's security agencies for entering their territorial waters over the last few months were released on Friday and reached Vadodara last night.
Majority of them hail from Gujarat, union territory of Diu and Daman, Maharashtra and were lodged in jails in Karachi.
They also complained that they were not served proper food, were made to wash cloths of Pakistani prisoners and clean the toilets.
One Govind alleged that his left eye was damaged while in custody due to infection and the jail authorities never provided him any medical assistance.

The fishermen said that the Pakistani authorities were worried after the killing of death row convict Sarabjit Singh at a Lahore jail and separated them from Pakistani inmates and put up in different cells.

They also alleged that whatever allowances they earned by working in the prison used to be taken away by the jail staff.
"Even gifts sent by our family members in India were never delivered to us and stolen by the jail staff," a fisherman said.
The entertainment available to them in the jails was the watching of Hindi movies, another fisherman said adding the Pakistani jail inmates were not allowed to see the movies along with them.

These fishermen were also critical about the attitude of the officials of Indian high commission in Islamabad who allegedly never bothered to extend any help to them.
They said that there were about 450 odd Indian fishermen still languishing in Pak jails and carried letters sent by some of them requesting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi to take up the issue of their release with the Pakistan government.