LAHORE - Tales of how corrupt, brutal and harsh the police are, are so common, it really does not prick our conscience anymore. So if someone would say the force is rotten to the core that is just normal. In fact each one of us has a story of their own to tell relating how they were met by this police officer or that and how terrible the entire experience was. But here is one story perhaps you would have seldom heard, which goes on to show why everyone is so much afraid of the word police.
The place was Lahore High Court where the entire story was told on Wednesday. The poor victim (the petitioner) was a housewife, Nasim Akhtar, who told she was being blackmailed by someone who had taken her pictures, morphed them and came up with pornographic images of her.
And guess who was doing that to her, this despicable act one can ever imagine? Well it was her former husband, a police officer. ASI – Maqsood Ahmed - with Faisalabad police, who said the charges were trumped up but investigation and proof established that the lady was saying the truth. The lady told the court that her former husband was harassing and blackmailing her through the pictures. And why was he doing that? It was because of the 19-year-old daughter that he had taken away with him after separation.
The court heard the tragic details in total disbelief. The judge expressed serious concern over the conduct of the man who was supposed to be the custodian of law.
Once the proof was there, the court had the ASI arrested and thrown in jail, the very jail where he would have thought he could lock up anybody and the tremendous sense of power that gave him the impudence to fall so low as to turn her own former wife into a porn model. The Faisalabad Capital Police officer was also present when the entire case unraveled. He too had strong words for the culprit.
In fact, cases where pictures have been doctored into pornography and uploaded on the internet are not new but this time what is really shocking is that the culprit did that to his own former wife. How low can you fall? That is reflection of the kind of mentality that the police officers have; obviously, they can get away with anything, even murder. So for a police officer to design nude pictures of his former wife who was demanding that her daughter be given back to her was just nothing, he might have assumed.
Police is the department that is there to protect peoples’ lives and more than anything else give them a sense of security. But that is the last feeling or thought any citizen would experience on seeing a police mobile or a police station for that matter. Hence the trust has shattered completely.