KARACHI, PAKISTAN — Abid Raza Zaidi winces occasionally as he tells how police hung him upside down and beat him with leather straps to get him to confess to taking part in a deadly bombing in Karachi.
He remembers being forced to stand for hours without rest, and the strange serenity he felt when police said they had determined he was guilty and would execute him in the morning.
The police eventually let him go. The 35-year-old doctoral student is home now, surrounded by his beloved books on zoology again, sunlight and the squeals of children filtering into his house in the warrens of a poor Karachi neighborhood.
But for four months last year, Zaidi's friends and family had no idea where he was. He is one of hundreds of Pakistanis allegedly swept up by the country's security forces in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, when President Pervez Musharraf began a crackdown on Islamic extremists.
Human rights activists say the government has since extended its dragnet to include others who oppose it. At least 600 people, and perhaps hundreds more, are missing, they say, held without charge in undisclosed locations with no access to family or a lawyer.
The battle over the fate of Pakistan's so-called disappeared has been a major source of friction between Musharraf and the country's Supreme Court, which over the last year had begun to call the government to account for its missing citizens.
In rulings that encompassed more than 100 cases of missing people, then Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry ordered the government to disclose the whereabouts of the missing and file charges or release them.
Musharraf accused the court of endangering public security by setting terrorists free, and the tension was central to the escalating clash of wills between the president and the judiciary.
Although Musharraf's decision to fire the country's top judges last month came just before a Supreme Court ruling that could have disqualified him from the presidency, lawyers point out that he was already furious with what he considered to be grand-standing judges poking into areas where police, the army and intelligence services have long operated with impunity.
The government has been cagey about media reports last week that it freed, or was set to free, about 100 of the missing to assuage international criticism.
