Day: January 5, 2009

KARACHI – Pakistan’s first women drugs addict rehabilitation and treatment centre has been shelved due to financial burden, The Nation has learnt on Sunday.

The women centre is being run under the supervision of New Horizon Care Centre which provides free of cost treatment to drug addicts for the last one decade in the City.

The Coordinator of New Horizon Naveed Younis told The Nation that there was urgent need for establishing the treatment and rehabilitation centre for drug addict women as several families of addicted women had contacted us for their treatment. Due to high inflation, it is very difficult for the New Horizon Care Centre (Male) to offer this treatment to women.

He, however, maintained that counselling and treatment facility would be provided to the women drug-addicts at their residence, but they would not be facilitated at the centre because of the paucity of the funds.

He said that the women centre worked for more than one year and it provided free treatment and rehabilitation with the facility of meal and medicines to the female addicts. But now his organisation cannot bear the expenditures of the rent of the place, rehabilitation of the women patients, it has been closed, he said.

He regretted that despite hectic efforts, neither city government nor provincial and federal government come forward to help to run the centre, while every body knows that his organisation is working diehard from one decade provided free treatment with rehabilitation to the drug addicts.

“We were striving to get a place either a plot or building for establishing the centre and contacted many times to the high ups of CDGK, Sindh Govt and Federal Govt and they came here to see all the process of the treatment and facilities which are provided to the male and female patients,” he added.

He further said that the drugs rehabilitation centre for male is also on rent and there is no secret that daily increase in the number of patients.

The head of the women centre Ms Farheen Siddiqui told the Nation that around 100 women patients had been treated in the centre.

The organisation was not ready to close the Pakistan’s first women drug treatment centre, but the current wave of inflation compelled us to shut the women centre,” she added.

She mentioned that the details of the patients are kept secret when they contact for getting treatment at their own residence and such patients will be rehabilitated with the involvement of their family members.
Source: The Nation
Date:1/5/2009

LAHORE: Local Taliban have warned women against going to the office of the NADRA and getting identity cards, BBC Urdu reported. Around 200 women from the region had recently submitted forms for computerised identity cards, which they require to benefit from the Benazir Income Support Programme. Women going to NADRA offices or coeducation schools would be punished in line with the sharia, the BBC quoted a pamphlet by the Hafiz Gul Bahar group as saying.
Source: Daily Times
Date:1/5/2009

A 22-year-old widow, the mother of a six-month-old girl, was found hanging off a ceiling fan in her apartment in Gulistan-i-Jauhar.

The Sharea Faisal police said that Saba Fatima, widow of Ghulam Abbas, was alone at her flat as her mother had taken the infant with her.

They said that the victimÂ’s mother reached her daughter’s flat at around 10am, and found her body hanging from the ceiling.

The body was shifted to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre for a postmortem examination.

Sources at the hospital’s medico-legal section told Dawn that the victim was strangled.

Area SHO, Chaudhry Amir, told Dawn that the culprit or culprits hanged the woman to suggest that she committed suicide.

He said that the woman was believed to have been strangulated in the small hours of the morning.

The SHO said that the police were collecting the details of the people who last visited the victim. He said that the victim’s mother was still in a state of shock and she was unable to record her statement.

Sources said that the victim’s husband was a businessman and he was also shot dead in Korangi some nine months ago by two bandits. No case was registered till late, as the police were still waiting for someone from the victim’s family to lodge the FIR.

The police said that the incident seemed to be motivated by a personal feud, as nothing precious was missing from the victim’s apartment.
Source: Dawn
Date:1/5/2009

KARACHI, Jan 4: Two young women were killed on Sunday in separate acts of violence in the city, police and witnesses said.

The Surjani Town police said that an unidentified young women, clad in pink trousers and black shirt, was found shot dead at around 12.30am near Usman Ghani Masjid at Sector 4-B.

The body was shifted to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for a post-mortem.

Sources at the hospitalÂ’s medico-legal section told Dawn that the victim, who appeared to be in her late teens or early 20s, was shot twice in her chest.

Citing a lack of blood stains on the spot, the police said that the woman had been killed somewhere else by the culprits, who threw the body in Surjani Town.

They said that the culprits also placed two empties of a TT pistol beside the body to make the police believe that the woman was killed at the spot.

The police said that the victim was clothed after being shot, as there were no bullet holes in her clothing.

The police said that the chemical examination report would ascertain whether the victim was also criminally assaulted before she was shot dead.

They said that the body was kept at the Edhi morgue after postmortem examination, as efforts were underway to ascertain the identity of the victim.

The police said that a case (FIR 8/2009) was registered against unknown culprits under Sections 302 (murder) and 34 (common intention) of the PPC on behalf of the state.

Meanwhile, sources said that the police contacted the family of a young girl, Tania, a resident of Model Colony, in connection with the shooting. Tania had been missing for the past one and half years.
Source: Dawn
Date:1/5/2009

ISLAMABAD, Jan 4: The government has decided to take the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) to people in tribal areas, despite reported threats from the local Taliban that women receiving monetary help would be killed.

“We are committed to launching the programme because it is purely Islamic and aimed at helping the poor,” BISP’s chairperson Farzana Raja told Dawn on Sunday.

She said the people in North Waziristan, including the Taliban, should meet their MNAs and Senators for information about the programme because it appeared that because of some misconceptions they had decided to stop women from receiving financial assistance.

Ms Raja said that tribal women would not have to go to any office because the monetary support would be provided at their doorstep.

“The women will not have to go out of their homes to get their cards because lady workers of Nadra will visit them and complete the process.” She said the card required only thumb impression and not photograph.She rejected Taliban’s claim that tribal women would become morally corrupt and said that the programme was similar to the Zakat system. “How can one call our programme un-Islamic,” she said.

Under the programme, some 3.5 million households will get Rs2,000 every two months and money orders will be sent in the name of women beneficiaries to their home address through the Pakistan Post.

She said around 127,000 families would soon get Rs3,000 for the three months with effect from Oct 1.
Source: Dawn
Date:1/5/2009