Ayyan indicted in money laundering case

Supermodel pleads not guilty to money laundering charges

A customs court in Rawalpindi indicted on Thursday supermodel Ayyan in a money laundering case which was previously deferred a number of times, Express News reported.

According to reports, the court while rejecting the objections raised by the counsel of the accused said the proceedings in the case will be carried out subsequently.

The model, however, pleaded not guilty to the charges of money laundering and said she would defend herself against the case in which she has been purposefully implicated.



Further, the customs court Judge Rana Aftab Ahmed directed the customs department to produce five witnesses out of a total 14 in the court on December 8.

It is worth mentioning that custom officer Chaudhry Ijaz, one of the key witnesses in the case, was murdered. Ijaz was shot in the leg when two armed motorcyclists opened fire at him in the remits of Waris Khan police station.



The model was arrested from Benazir Bhutto International Airport with $500,000 in March this year. The Airport Security Force intercepted her and recovered the said amount from her luggage. She was released on bail after four months in Adiala Jail.

Earlier this month, the customs court rejected a plea filed by the model’s counsel seeking her acquittal in the currency smuggling case. The accused along with her counsel Sardar Latif Khosa appeared before Customs Court Judge Rana Aftab Ahmad while Farhat Lodhi appeared on behalf of Pakistan Customs and Amin Feroze represented Customs Intelligence.



Later, the model moved Lahore High Court (LHC) against the customs court verdict regarding her acquittal in the case. The LHC will now hear the case on November 22 (Monday).

In August, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) had upheld the objections raised by its registrar office on a petition seeking the court’s directives for the interior ministry to put Ayyan’s name on the exit control list (ECL). Petitioner Arshad Mehmood Butt had prayed the court to issue orders to probe if the model had paid taxes on the cash she carried on her total 81 trips out of the country.

The IHC registrar office had raised objection that the petitioner has no locus standi (the right of a party to be heard by a court) to raise such issues. The registrar office maintained that the petitioner was in no manner an aggrieved party to raise questions over the issue.

IHC Justice Noorul Haq Qureshi while upholding the registrar office’s objections had noted that the petitioner did not obtain adequate remedy by going to an alternative forum and, instead, directly petitioned the court. The court also observed that the petition did not have supportive documents to show that the petitioner himself was a taxpayer.



In the petition, the petitioner had quoted a letter written by an intelligence agency to the interior ministry which said that the money smuggled through the model could be used to finance terrorism in the country. He prayed to investigate Ayyan’s bank accounts to ascertain the actual identity of the person who had transferred the money on her account.