‘Blasphemer’ granted bail after four months

Alleged defilement occurred when pages were burnt in a dirty place.


Rana Tanveer February 11, 2011

LAHORE: The Lahore High Court on Thursday granted bail to a man accused of blasphemy who had been in jail for four months. Justice Muhammad Anwarul Haq ordered the man to furnish surety bonds worth Rs200,000 for concession of bail.

The accused, Shahid Hassan Sheikh, a resident of Batapur, submitted that he was implicated in the case for belonging to a sect other than that of his accusers.

In his bail application, Sheikh said that complainant Ahsan Nawab had  implicated him in the case at the behest of Malik Iftikhar.

Sheikh said he was the vice president of the Batapur Ahl-e-Hadith Mosque Committee and had rented out a shop linked to the mosque to Iftikhar. He said Iftikhar implicated him and two of his employees in a false case when he asked for the payment of rent. He said the complainant was from the Barelvi sect and bore him a grudge.

His employees, he added, had already been released on bail.

Sheikh said Javed Ahmed, the father of the only person named as eye-witness, 14-year-old Akmal Javed, had recorded a statement before the police that Shekh was a religious man and denied the allegations against him.

Abid Hassan Butt, a brother of Shahid Butt who has also been accused of blasphemy in the same incident, told The Express Tribune that the investigating officer Inspector Aftab Hashmi had deliberately implicated his brother and the other men.

He said the inspector was Shi’ite and it was his religious rivalry with the Ahl-e-Hadith that drove him to implicate Butt. He said Inspector Hashmi had tortured his 14-year-old nephew, Sami, for refusing to record a statement according to his wishes.

A prosecutor told the court that the police had recovered a stick from the accused which the witnesses said was used for burning the pages. He said two pages and ashes of some partially burnt pages collected from the scene showed that the Quran burning incident had occurred. He said the accused had claimed that their sect allowed them to burn old pages of the holy book but the defilement occurred when they were burnt in a dirty place. This, the prosecutor said, was what the accused had done.

Local Ahl-e-Sunnat scholars and people of Jallo Mor accused Butt and his business partners, Shahid Sheikh and Nawazish, of burning pages of the Holy Quran and had an FIR registered against them under Section 295-B of the Pakistan Penal Code at Batapur Police Station on October 3. A Jamia Naeemia mufti has issued a decree in favour of the accused.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 11th, 2011.

COMMENTS (1)

talat | 13 years ago | Reply An advocate of Attock City, Aein Fatmy, who was implicated in a blasphemy case, a few years back, was also granted bail, but was soon killed. What use are these Blasphemy Laws: Only to add tyranny and torture to death, without letting judicial proceedings to be finalized?
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