It is a story of cross-border love which led the 33-year-old, Hamid Nehal Ansari to a Pakistan jail. Ansari an Indian citizen spent six years in a Pakistani jail and returned to India on Tuesday, 18 December. He was detained in 2012 by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies for “illegally” entering the country from Afghanistan, reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online. Ansari was caught with a fake Pakistani ID in his pocket in Kohat, a town near Peshawar.
He had travelled to Kohat, Peshawar “illegally” in order to find and rescue the woman he loved from being married off to someone else.
Ansari left home for Kohat in Pakistan at the age of 27. As reported by The Quint, his mother Fauzia had said that Hamid had left for Kabul on 4 November 2012 under the pretext of having received a job as an airport manager in Afghanistan.
Initially he was in constant touch with his parents until 10 November. But later they lost contact with him. Now only they came to know that Pakistani authorities had picked him up.
As reported by the Scroll, Ansari’s parents said that after he had gone missing, they logged into his Facebook account and checked his emails. They found out that he had been talking to a Pakistani woman for two years, and seemed to be in love with her.