Parents, siblings and children gather regularly in Islamabad to demand the government tell them where their relatives are. Some of these people, believed to be detained by the security services, have been missing without any word for five years or more. (Naheed Mustafa/CBC)

"I would rather they kill him, shoot him like a dog." The old woman was clutching a gilt-framed picture of her son, Faisal, and it was him she was referring to.

I met Zainab Khatoon at a rally this past summer in Islamabad. She had come to the Pakistan capital from Lahore and, like dozens of other family members, she was here to demand the government explain what has happened to their relatives who had "disappeared."

By some accounts, as many as 10,000 Pakistanis have mysteriously vanished over the past nine or so years and are believed to be detained by the country's powerful security agencies for so-called anti-state activities.

The government admits to about 1,100 and, in recent months, the Pakistan Supreme Court has demanded explanations for what has happened in a handful of specific cases. The court has also called for the establishment of a national inquiry.

Zainab Khatoon, the mother of mechanical engineer Fasial Faraz, at a rally in Islamabad in the summer of 2010. (Naheed Mustafa/CBC)

But little action has been taken and the wait is driving relatives like Zainab to despair.

If her son has been killed, "at least then I will have his corpse and I will learn to live with his death," she says. "The way it is now, I am neither living nor dead. I don't know if or when my son will come home."

Her son, Faisal Faraz, went to meet a friend one day, five years ago. Neither he nor his friend, Masood Janjua, a local businessman, returned.

Masood's wife, Amina, organizes these rallies on a regular basis. She set up a support group called Defence of Human Rights Pakistan in the computer school her husband used to help run in Rawalpindi, just outside Islamabad.

Sometimes these rallies are massive, sometimes small, a reflection perhaps of the families' optimism that their questions will ever be answered.

The day I attended there were maybe 80 people present. They shouted slogans and demanded justice. They called out the president and prime minister, punching the air with their fists.

What was most striking was how different these families were from each other: rich, poor, educated, illiterate, rural, urban. If it wasn't for their shared circumstance, it is obvious many of these people would never have crossed paths.

How many

Since 9/11 and particularly since the London bombings in July 2005, thousands of Pakistanis have been picked up by the country's intelligence agencies, often at the behest of the CIA and often in return for some kind of bounty.

It is impossible to know exactly how many people are in custody. Human rights groups say 10,000; Pakistan's Ministry of Interior admits to 1,100 people in detention.

For the very few who have been released, they are typically lost to themselves and their families, suffering physically and emotionally.

The few details that have emerged suggest a campaign of detention and torture that is systematic.

At one point, during the rally I attended, a woman rushed out of the crowd and headed straight toward me.

Her husband, she said, had been picked up in connection to Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who tried to set off a bomb in Times Square earlier this year.

Her husband "has been missing since May 17 and they won't tell me where he is," she said. "I have a one-month-old baby. We don't even know Faisal Shahzad!" She broke down, tears streaming past her dark glasses.

A determined mom

Amina Janjua, the rally organizer, is a mid-fortyish middle-class housewife with three kids.

Her husband, Masood, "was very active, joyful and lively. On weekends we would drive to the Murree hills. He pampered us, he understood us," Amina says.

When Masood didn't come home that night in July, his father begged the police for help while Masood's colleagues made the rounds of local hospitals and clinics. But he appeared to have simply vanished.

Then, almost a year later, Amina received her first tip: a man who had disappeared around the same time had recently been dumped on his own doorstep.

He said he had been picked up by Pakistani intelligence, questioned by Americans and tortured. He said there were many men like himself in detention and one of them was Masood.

Amina Janjua, the rally organizer. Her husband Masood has been missing for almost five years. (Naheed Mustafa/CBC)

"I have been struggling since that day," Amina says. "There's no door I haven't knocked. Ministries, courts, the prime minister, the president. But even after five years I am without justice."

At one point Amina pitched a tent outside the Supreme Court building and moved in. She was planning to stay until she had some answers but with three children and no source of income other than her husband's now-failing business, she had to return home.

So far, 850 families have registered their cases with Amina's organization.

Before 2001, the "disappeared" were primarily ethnic nationalists from Pakistan's largest province, Balochistan. But the practice widened after 9/11.

In his memoir, Pakistan's former president Gen. Pervez Musharraf mentions that two days after the attacks on the U.S., he was given a list of demands by the American government.

One of them was the expectation that Pakistan would give the U.S. access to domestic intelligence. In a country where civil liberties are tenuous, it didn't take much for the sweeps to begin.

Amina equally blames Pakistan's army, intelligence community and the American government for her struggle.

She says that if any of those parties wanted to they could have her husband released.

Still, she is determined to carry on and convinced that she will be successful. "I will fight forever. God has given me such a hope that my husband is going to come back. We will have our golden days again."