When fishermen came back with Pak `gift'

When fishermen came back with Pak `gift'
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

RAJKOT, JANUARY 10: The authorities in Rajkot do not really know how to handle this case. They have never come across such an incident. Last week, when the fishermen from Okha came back, the had a ``gift'' from Pakistan along with the catch.

A man was `forcibly' off-loaded onto an Indian fishing boat by Pakistan Marine Security. According to the crew of the fishing boat `Shivhari', a Pakistan Marine Security boat approached them while they were fishing off the Okha coast and forcibly handed over a man who they said was an Indian fisherman.

Laxman Nanji Tandel, leader of the fishing crew, said: ``Their boat came alongside us and they shoved this man into our boat saying he was one of our own and sped away even before we could react. This man neither spoke nor understood what we were saying. He is definitely not one of us.''

The fishing boat returned to Okha and the man was handed over to customs officers who took him into custody for interrogation. Said Customs Inspector G H Parvani: ``He did not speakany of the languages known to us."

"Assuming he was a Pakistani, we called in a couple of maulvis who spoke to him in Urdu and tried some other languages, but he did not respond." We could not even find out his name. We handed him over to the Jakhau police station who passed him on to the Joint Interrogation Centre, Bhuj," he added.

Kutch DSP A K Singh confirmed that the unidentified man was being held at the JIC. ``His identity has not been established so far because he seems to be suffering from a speech impediment as well as some mental illness. His native place is also a mystery although the clothes he is wearing have tags in Urdu.''

Singh said that though he seemed to be harmless from the security angle, he was being held as a suspect foreign national.

JIC officials say that he could be of a Sindhi Hindu, settled in Pakistan because when he was asked to write, some of his alphabets looked like Hindi. ``He could be a deportee from Pakistan gauging by the manner in which he was dumped by thePakistan marine agency,'' an officer said.