New Delhi:
Fasih Mahmood, an engineer from Darbhanga in Bihar, was picked up by officials from his home in Jubail in Saudi Arabia for alleged terror links. Now his wife has decided to knock at the doors of the courts to locate his whereabouts.
While media reports, quoting unnamed sources, had cited an Indian Mujahideen terror link behind his arrest and deportation, no Indian authority seems to know anything about him 'officially'.
"At least tell us where Fasih is," is what wife Nikhat Parveen has been asking while she runs from pillar to post to find out the whereabouts of her husband.
Fasih, was reportedly picked up from his home in Saudi Arabia, where he had been working for five years.
His family and friends are now planning to knock the doors of courts as a last resort.
"We have written to every possible authority - from Ministry of External Affairs to Home, to Bihar and Karnataka governments to the Saudi embassy in India. But nobody is telling us anything about it. If he was wanted in any case tell us the charges, if he was not, consider him a missing person," Parveen, who says she was with Fasih when the latter was picked up in Saudi Arabia, told PTI.
The family also approached authorities in Karnataka in view of the fact that he had studied there and the state police had made some arrests from Bihar recently.
According to 22-year-old Nikhat Parveen, on May 13, a group of Saudi and Indian officials in civilian clothes searched their house in Jubail in Dammam. They confiscated a laptop and mobile phone and informed them that Fasih has to be deported as he is wanted in India.
Parveen, who had married Fasih in September last year and had joined him in Saudi only in March, contacted the Indian embassy. Failing to get any information from there, she came to India on May 15.
"The MEA responded to my letters, but their Gulf section said they had no information on the issue and was awaiting details from the Indian mission. We met Home Secretary R K Singh, who said he knew nothing about such a person. The CBI Chief also says that they know nothing," she claimed barely managing to keep her composure.
Back home in Barsamela village in Darbhanga, the family of Fasih, who had obtained a BTech degree from a Bhatkal college in Karnataka, is shocked at the allegations of Indian Mujahideen links in media reports.
Fasih's father is a doctor with the Bihar government while his mother is the headmistress of a primary school. "Fasih is very good as a human being, the people of his village -- be it from any community -- vouch for him," says Parveen.
"It is our right to know what charges he is up against and where is he being held. He cannot be held just because he is from a particular village or because he has a degree from a college in Bhatkal," she says.
A family friend, who is helping Parveen out in New Delhi, claims Fasih is the 14th such arrest from Darbhanga district in the past few months.