10 yrs on, detained Pak boy has nowhere to go

Police records give Sherif’s Pakistan address as “Mohammed Sherif Sagar s/o Mohammed Ishaque, resident of Peer Saheb Gali No. 1, House No. 30, Ali Akbar Shah Road, Quarter number 100, Sector 50/C, Than No. 4, Orangi number 5-1/2, Karachi, Pakistan.”

Sherif says he was 13 when he and step-brother Abdul Ghafoor travelled from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. “My father was from Saudi Arabia. He married my mother, a Pakistani, and became a Pakistani citizen.”

He claims Ghafoor cooked up charges against him and landed him in trouble with the Saudi police. He says he was deported to India because he possessed a forged Indian passport which Ghafoor had handed him. Pakistan refused to accept him because he had an Indian passport. He was put on a flight to Mumbai. On the same flight, he met a man called Rafiq who was with him in a jail in Jeddah. Rafiq, he says, brought him to Lucknow but left him at the Charbagh railway station.

When he narrated his plight, the police picked him up. Sherif says he wants to return home to Pakistan but “if they don’t accept me, I hope I am granted an Indian citizenship. I want to be free, lead a normal life.”