ISLAMABAD: Kashmiri poet Ahmed Farhad was released from prison on Friday after the Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) High Court granted him bail, following his recent disappearance and arrest by police on various charges, including terrorism, his lawyer confirmed.
Known for social media posts critical of Pakistan’s powerful army, Farhad went missing from his Islamabad residence on May 14, prompting his wife to accuse the country’s top spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, of abducting him and filing a petition in the Islamabad High Court for his recovery.
The army did not comment on the development, though it has repeatedly said in the past it does not suppress critical voices.
Prior to his disappearance, Farhad had criticized the military using online platforms amid the unprecedented protests in AJK last month against rising flour prices and increased power tariffs.
“The high court has granted him bail, but he is still in jail due to some clerical error in the judgment,” Advocate Zulqarnain Haider Naqvi, his lawyer, told Arab News over the phone earlier in the day.
Later, he confirmed his client’s release, by briefly responding to a query about it in the affirmative.
Farhad faced two cases after the police in Dhirkot Tehsil in Bagh District charged him for sharing “provocative material” and “obstructing the official affairs,” while he was also booked by the authorities in Muzaffarabad and under the telegraph and anti-terrorism acts.
Naqvi said Farhad had got bail in the second case, adding the fate of the charges filed against him in Dhirkot was not clear at this stage.
Earlier this week, the Islamabad High Court declared Farhad a victim of enforced disappearances and directed authorities to refer to him as a “missing person” till he safely reached home.
Judge Mohsin Akhtar Kayani also said in his court order issued on Monday that state institutions had failed to recover the poet “arrested illegally.”
The court order instructed the authorities to produce Farhad before a judicial magistrate to record his statement under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) after his returns and “proceed with the investigation” on the basis of that.
According to this legal provision, any judicial magistrate can record an individual’s statement, regardless of jurisdiction.
After his disappearance from his home in Islamabad, Farhad resurfaced on May 29 in the custody of AJK police following multiple Islamabad High Court orders.
