The advocate for Pakistani national Khalid Mahmood Rashid, Zehir Omar, has accused the Department of Home Affairs of fabricating a document from the Pakistani Ministry of the Interior to show that Rashid was deported to Pakistan.
South African authorities arrested Rashid in October, and the Department of Home Affairs said he was deported to Pakistan the following month as an illegal immigrant.
In recent weeks, however, media reports have suggested that Rashid may have been subject to an “extra-ordinary rendition”, in which he was illegally turned over to foreign, possibly British, authorities. It has been suggested that he had al-Qaeda links.
The United States and United Kingdom have been accused of other renditions, in which foreign nationals have been flown to secret camps around the world as part of the “war against terror”.
Omar suggested the department forged and backdated correspondence from the Pakistani government confirming Rashid’s arrival in Pakistan after his alleged deportation on November 6 last year.
He said the forgery was committed in a bid to show that Rashid was deported to Pakistan when, in fact, he was turned over to the British authorities and flown out of the country, on a chartered plane, from Waterkloof airforce base.
Department spokesperson Cleo Mosana said last week that neither she nor Minister of Home Affairs Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula is aware of the allegations.
Officials in the Pakistani Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad did not reply to repeated requests for comment.
On Monday, the court deadline for home affairs to provide information about Rashid’s whereabouts expired. The minister was asked to produce the flight number of the plane on which Rashid was deported, the location where the plane landed and the names of the authorities who met him in Pakistan.
On the same day, the minister’s advocate applied for leave to appeal against the order, which is suspended pending the outcome.
Omar said the move suggests that the department cannot prove Rashid was sent to Pakistan. The application was especially troubling given Mapisa-Nqakula and her advocate’s claim that they could easily produce information showing that Rashid was deported to his home country.
“For the minister to engage in such conduct to delay her compliance with supplying crucial information like the details of a missing person smacks of a mindset which is obstructive to … human rights,” said Omar.
The question of why home affairs did not produce the details of Rashid’s whereabouts was “irrelevant”, said Mosana this week, and home affairs acted within the law by applying for leave to appeal.
Annette Hübschle, researcher for the Institute of Security Studies, said the South African government has been involved in cases of wrongful extradition before. She referred to the case of one of the perpetrators of the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Khalfan Khamis Mohamed was arrested in South Africa and turned over to American authorities before it was established that the death penalty would not be administered, a step required by South African law.
“The question with Khalid is that one doesn’t know what really happened,” said Hübschle. “If it was a deportation, then certainly the Department of Home Affairs should be able to furnish flight numbers and that sort of thing.
“Six months have passed and, if there is a wrongful case of rendition involved, it’s better to sort it out now than later.”