Parveen Rehman’s murder: Top court takes up HRCP petition

Counsel tells bench murderers being protected by a Karachi-based party.

ISLAMABAD:

A three-judge bench, headed by Justice Tassadaq Hussain Jilani, admitted a petition on the unsolved murder of Orangi Pilot Project director Parveen Rehman.

Setting aside the objections raised by the registrar’s office, the Supreme Court admitted the plea filed by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and citizens of Karachi.

Parveen Rehman, director of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP), was killed in Karachi six months ago, but a charge-sheet, too, has yet to be submitted in court.

The petitioner’s counsel told the court that Rehman’s murderers were still at large and they were being allegedly sheltered by a political party.

The petition aims to draw attention to justice denied to a person who dedicated three decades of her life to redress grievances of the poor in the face of land grabbers.

On the eve of the hearing, Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Centre director Fayyaz Baqir said, “Her killers, those who pulled the trigger and those who ordered it, remain at large. No one is there to guard those who dedicate their lives to public service.”

The petitioners include human rights activist Zohra Yousaf and journalist Zubaida Mustafa. The Sindh and federal governments and the provincial police have been cited as respondents in the case.

On March 13, unidentified men opened fire on Rehman. Rehman received several bullet wounds and later succumbed to her injuries.

Rehman was working on compiling land records of villages on the fringes of Karachi which were vanishing into the city’s vastness because of the ever-increasing demand from thousands of families migrating to the metropolis.

According to Rehman, around 1,500 villages were forcibly merged into the city by land grabbers over the past 15 years. The land was subdivided into plots, which were sold for billions of rupees.  She had also documented land in Orangi Town to protect the slum from land grabbers.

According to her colleagues, she had been receiving death threats from land grabbers. In one of her interviews, conducted in 2011, she had stated in detail the nature of land grabbing activities in Karachi and the threats received by her and her colleagues.

One of her colleagues, Naseemur Rehman, told The Express Tribune that if today we compromise on this murder of a community worker then nobody will dare to stand for the uplift of the poor strata of society. “We will not let this case die in the files,” he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2013.