Khalid Rashid — the Pakistani whose 2005 deportation from South Africa sparked a media furore and a court challenge to the government — has broken his silence.
And his account, in a telephone interview from Pakistan, flatly contradicts the hHme Affairs Department’s repeated claims that he was deported as an illegal immigrant in terms of standard procedure.
It has long been suspected that Rashid was spirited out of the country by police and handed over to the Pakistani secret police, the ISI, as part of the war on terror.
He was released six weeks ago after being held for 18 months in Pakistan at various secret locations.
Rashid told the Mail & Guardian:
- He was held incommunicado for a week after his arrest at the Cullinan police station, denied access to a lawyer and not permitted to contact the Pakistani embassy. He said the light was kept burning in his cell;
- He was interrogated by up to 20 officers, several of whom appeared to be British, and asked to identify a host of photographs of people he did not know; and
- He was ”tricked” by a home affairs official into signing documents waiving his right to challenge his deportation and agreeing to remain in custody until he was deported.
This appears to be a reference to the ”notification of deportation”, signed by Rashid, which the home affairs department produced in court to show that he had been routinely deported as an illegal alien.
Rashid was arrested in Estcourt, KwaZulu-Natal, in October 2005 and flown out of the country on a chartered jet from the Waterkloof air force base a week later.
His lawyer, Zehir Omar, took court action to establish his whereabouts and later to have the arrest and deportation struck down as unlawful.
Central to the case were the ”samoosa files” — secret home affairs documents that accidentally fell into Omar’s hands during the hearing. The precise content of these may not be revealed, but they indicated that home affairs provided cover for a clandestine operation, executed by unknown national and international secret agents, and assisted by the South African Police Service.
At the core of the operation were allegations that Rashid had links to international terrorist organisations and that he was wanted for questioning in connection with the London bombings of July 2005.
Judge Bernard Ngoepe rejected Omar’s application in February this year after refusing to admit the ”samoosa files” as evidence.
Rashid’s account matches some of the contents of the home affairs documents.
He said he was held incommunicado at a police station in Cullinan for the week before his deportation, where he was denied contact with lawyers and his embassy. Asked why he was signed out each day from the police station for interrogation, he said: ”I don’t know. They just walked me around to the back of the police station.”
On the alleged involvement of British officials and his links with terrorist activities, Rashid said: ”They didn’t tell me anything. Every day they showed me pictures of people — European, American, African, Muslims, all sorts. I told them I didn’t know any of them.
”About 15 to 20 people interrogated me. Four or five were British, the rest were South Africans, white and black. One Indian [officer] even spoke my language. I asked them: ‘Why are you doing this to me?”’
Rashid said he suffered from a stress-related skin condition. ”I had a lot of stress. Then my heart problems started. I asked to see a Muslim doctor. Eventually another doctor came and gave me medication for my heart.
”I had stomach problems because I was starved; they denied me halaal food so I could eat only the salad. I could not sleep at night because they kept the light on all the time.”
Asked why, if he was innocent and did not want to be deported, he had waived his rights, Rashid said: ”The man from home affairs tricked me. He said he would help me; he asked me to sign papers and promised me asylum. He said to me: ‘You can stay here if you don’t want to go back.’ But he also told me: ‘We are going to send you home on a chartered plane.’ I said a hundred times that I did not want to go back.”
Rashid said he had been asked to sign papers involving ”complicated law things only a lawyer can understand. I did not know what I was signing.”
He said he had been transported to an airport — now known to be the Waterkloof air force base — in the early hours of November 6 2005, handcuffed and blindfolded.
Approached for reaction, home affairs spokesperson Jacky Mashapu referred the M&G to a departmental statement of August 6 last year.
This reaffirmed that in terms of a court order, the contents of the ”samoosa files” could not be disclosed and denied that the department had tampered with documents.