'Mistake was mine,' Mumbai engineer Hamid Ansari on Pakistan ordeal

Mumbai techie Hamid Nehal Ansari crossed the Attari-Wagah border into India on Tuesday and reunited with his family after spending six long years in a jail in Pakistan.

Ansari was arrested in 2012 and charged with espionage and forgery after he crossed to Pakistan to save a social media friend from forced marriage. According to the Indian Express, he was physically tortured by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and that his left eye was damaged. Ansari was left in solitary confinement initially after his arrest.

Ansari does not blame anybody for his ordeal because the fault was his own. "The mistake was mine. Though my motives were good, I took the wrong step and I have paid the price for it," he clarified.

Ansari has a piece of advice to those looking to fall in love. "Never fall in love on Facebook," he said, according to the Indian Express.

“The second lesson that I have learnt is never to hide anything from your parents and follow the legal route for anything."

“I don’t want to talk about what happened in Pakistan right now. But I am happy for all the support I got,” he added. “I want to look at the future. I have to find a job and after that I also have to find a woman to get married.”

Talking about what prompted him to cross the border in an attempt to rescue the girl he befriended on social media, Ansari said: “She asked for help and I started hunting for a visa. There were people from Pakistan who posed as friends and said they would help. I thought from the heart and not from brain. They asked me to come through Afghanistan. They kept fake IDs and documents in my pocket."

He said there were policemen waiting for him before he reached the girl’s house.

“The moment I got arrested I thought I was doomed. That moment I thought I was never going to go home but then as time went by I started getting hope that I would go home,” he said “The first three years I spent underground alone, sometimes they would give me food, and sometimes they wouldn’t. I had this motivation that I have to go back home and serve my parents. I have given them a huge pain and this will be my repentance. This is the least I can do,” he said in an interview, reported news agency PTI.