AMRITSAR: Mumbai resident Fauzia Ansari has not been able to stop smiling of late. This is because her son, Hamid Nehal Ansari, will be returning to India via the Attari border check post near here in December this year, after serving a three-year jail term for espionage in the neighbouring country.Fauzia said Hamid had entered the neighbouring country through the Afghanistan border to meet his girlfriend, who he befriended on Facebook in 2012. “My son’s lawyer in Pakistan, Qazi Mohammad Anwar, said Nehal will be handed over to Indian authorities at Attari border, after the completion of his jail term on December 15, 2018,” Fauzia told TOI over the phone from Mumbai on Saturday.Quoting Anwar, she said the Peshawar high court had disposed of her son’s petition seeking remission of his three-year jail term, but it had assured to deport him after the completion of his jail term in December. She informed that the court had also declined to substitute the word “espionage and anti-state activities” with “illegal activities”.Nehal was convicted by a military court in the neighbouring country for espionage and anti-state activates and was sentenced on December 15, 2015.Nehal, an MBA, was a teacher in Mumbai before he left India for Afghanistan on a tourist visa on November 4, 2012. He stayed in touch with his family till November 10, 2012. Two days later, he crossed over to Pakistan on a fake name, Hamza, and stayed at Karak, Khyber Pakhtunwala province, with a friend for two days and was then picked up by the police and intelligence agencies.For nearly four years, his family didn’t get any information of Nehal’s whereabouts, until January 13, 2016, when it was revealed that he was in custody of the Pakistani army and was tried by a military court on the charges of spying and indulging in anti-Pakistan activities.Fauzia said all this time she had never received any letter from her son or had not also spoken to him over the phone.

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