By Staff Reporter
LAHORE: Twenty-five Pakistani fishermen walked back into their home country on Saturday afternoon, released from Indian prisons and escorted across the Wagah-Attari border crossing in a repatriation, the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi confirmed later in the day.
The men completed immigration formalities on the Indian side before being handed over to Pakistani authorities, according to the high commission, which said its officials were present at the border to help coordinate the handover. Once across, the fishermen were turned over to the Punjab Rangers, according to Ghulam Rasool Sheikh, a spokesman for the Fishermen’s Cooperative Society, who spoke with the newspaper Dawn.
“The Government of Pakistan will continue its efforts for the release and repatriation of all Pakistani citizens detained in Indian jails,” the high commission said in its statement.
The 25 men released on Saturday came from Karachi and Thatta, coastal areas in Sindh province that for generations have sent fishermen into the waters of the Arabian Sea — waters where the maritime boundary between Pakistan and India is neither clearly marked nor consistently respected, and where straying, even by a matter of miles, can mean months or years behind bars.
The Fishermen’s Cooperative Society welcomed the men’s release in a statement issued after the crossing.
“The Fishermen’s Cooperative Society extends heartfelt congratulations to the fishing community on the release of 25 Pakistani fishermen who had been imprisoned in Indian jails,” the group said, adding that it hoped the men “would return to their homes and families and resume their normal lives.”
The release follows a public appeal made earlier this month by a coalition of advocacy organisations on both sides of the border. In a letter addressed to the prime ministers of both Pakistan and India, the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy, the National Fishworkers Forum in India, the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, and relatives of imprisoned fishermen called on both governments to immediately release and repatriate prisoners who had already completed their sentences and whose nationalities had been confirmed by their home governments.
The detentions reflect a long-running and largely quiet feature of the fraught relationship between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. Fishermen from both countries are routinely arrested for crossing the maritime boundary in the Arabian Sea, a line that is difficult to detect from open water and that fishing crews, often working in modest wooden boats without sophisticated navigation equipment, can cross without realising it. Detainees frequently remain jailed well beyond the length of their original sentences, caught in a bureaucratic process that requires nationality verification and diplomatic coordination between two governments that do not always communicate easily.
Before Saturday’s release, 53 Pakistani fishermen remained imprisoned in India, while 198 Indian fishermen were being held in Pakistani jails, according to the most recent figures available. Advocacy groups have said that many of those still detained finished serving their court-ordered sentences years ago and continue to be held while awaiting the paperwork and diplomatic clearance needed to send them home.
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