her mother was sick (which she was not), Musharraf in effect acknowledged that this was a lie. On 12 June 2005 Mukhtaran was abruptly asked by the government to travel to Lahore to meet with provincial assembly member Shagufta Anwar, and then go to Islamabad to meet with Presidential advisor, Nilofer Bakhtiar. Mukhtaran stated that she did not know the purpose of the trip but knew that she would be meeting "one Shagufta and in Islamabad the PM’s adviser". She again criticized the police personnel assigned at her residence in Meerwala, saying that they had made life miserable for her and her family, and that her aide Naseem was denied exit from Mukhtaran's house. Furthermore, the local police were pressing her to surrender her passport, coinciding with an invitation extended by an organization of Pakistani doctors in North America for Mukhtaran to attend a moot being organized there that month to discuss the state of women and human rights in Pakistan. Mukhtaran observed that "I think the government does not want me to attend that moot (..) for this reason, perhaps, my name has been put on the Exit Control List". On 13 June following a lunch at the Chief Minister's House in Lahore, she left for Islamabad with Bakhtiar's secretary assigned to 'escort' her. Contact with Mukhtaran could not be established to know the purpose of her visit to Lahore, because her cellular phone did not respond for hours. On 14 June 2005, at a press conference in Islamabad, Mukhtaran demanded removal of her name from the Exit Control List, and also complained that she was "virtually under house arrest" because of the large police contingent assigned to protect her. Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani human rights lawyer confirmed that Mukhtaran had been taken to Islamabad, furiously berated and told that Musharraf was very angry with her. She was led sobbing to detention at a secret location and barred from contacting anyone, including her lawyer. Jahangir said Mukhtaran was in illegal custody. Passport confiscated On 19 June 2005, The New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof reported that as Mai returned from the US embassy in Islamabad, after getting her passport stamped with a US visa, it was "confiscated" by Musharraf's government, they were claiming she was now free to travel to the U.S., and removing her name from the ECL, thus rendering her unable to travel outside the country.