QUETTA: Two guards of Sardar Akhtar Mengal, the former Balochistan chief minister being tried in Karachi by an anti-terrorism court, have told the Balochistan High Court that they were held in solitary confinement and tortured in custody.

Ghulam Hadier and Abdul Khaliq also told a BHC bench of Justice Amanullah Khan Yasinzai and Justice Akhtar Zaman that they and 12 other servants and guards of Mengal were picked up by “intelligence personnel”.

Mengal’s 14 servants and guards “disappeared” after Mengal was moved to Karachi on December 23 after being held under house arrest at his Lasi Farm House since November 27.

They told the court that they were tortured for 20 days in 6x6 feet rooms which could accommodate four persons each. They added they had little knowledge of the rest of their companions. They could only hear their cries when they were being tortured but they were not allowed to meet them, they said.

Haider and Khaliq said they were handed over to Clifton Police in Karachi on February 24 with two other persons, Mohammad Rahim and Mohammad Ismail. They were warned that they would be whisked away again if they revealed their ordeal to anyone.

“They said they were brutally tortured and asked what heavy weapons Sardar Akhtar Mengal possessed, who visited him and who had links with him,” Zahoor Ahmed Shawani, vice president of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, told Daily Times.

Shawani said Haider and Khaliq had informed their captors that they had no knowledge about Mengal possessing heavy weapons or his contacts.

The HRCP vice president said two other missing guards of Sardar Mengal, Shah Nawaz and Bahar Ahmed, had resurfaced in Sakran in Lasbela district, but they were not speaking about their capture.

Earlier, Bashir Ahmed, a relative of some of the missing persons, filed a petition before the BHC demanding they be found. But Ghulam Yaseen, district police officer of Lasbela, told the court that Mengal’s guards and servants were not in police custody. Haider and Khaliq decided on their own to file an affidavit before the BHC.

The court asked the concerned federal and provincial departments to inform the court about the whereabouts of the rest of the missing persons.

Baloch nationalist say that over 4,000 Baloch political workers, students, intellectuals, poets, academics, doctors and engineers are missing.