Pervez Musharraf. PHOTO: FILE
An anti-terrorism court (ATC) has acquitted former military ruler Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf of the murder of Nawab Akbar Bugti, the Jamhoori Wattan Party chief, removing one of a barrage of cases against him. Interestingly, Musharraf didn’t appear in any of the 68 hearings of the case that dragged on for more than three and a half years.
Akbar Bugti was killed along with his loyalists in a military operation in August 2006 in the Kohlu area of Dera Bugti, triggering violent protests and fuelling a deadly separatist insurgency in Balochistan that started in 2004. The Bugti family charged Musharraf with the murder who, it says, had ordered the military operation.
A spokesman for Musharraf, who now leads All Pakistan Muslim League (APML) party, said the ATC ruling “will restore the people’s confidence in the judiciary”. Conversely, the Bugti family attorney called it a travesty of justice and decided to challenge the verdict.
ATC-I Judge Jan Muhammad Gohar also exonerated two other accused in the case – Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, a former federal interior minister, and Shoaib Nosherwani, a former home minister of Balochistan. “All three other nominees in the Bugti murder case have been acquitted for lack of evidence,” the judge said in a short order.
However, the court issued arrest warrants for former prime minister Shaukat Aziz, former Balochistan governor Owais Ahmed Ghani and former deputy commissioner of Dera Bugti Abdul Samad Lasi, who have been declared absconders because they did not appear before the court despite repeated notices published in newspapers.
The judge also turned down a request by Nawabzada Jamil Akbar Bugti, the eldest surviving son of the late Nawab Bugti, to order exhumation of the body buried in Dera Bugti for DNA test to confirm it was his father’s. In a separate application, Jamil Bugti had requested the court to summon the members of a parliamentary committee who had met his father following violence in Dera Bugti in March 2005 in which dozens were killed. It was also rejected by the court.
The Bugti murder FIR was registered under Sections 302 and 304 of the Pakistan Penal Code against Musharraf and others in 2009. The case remained dormant until 2011 when the Bugti family moved the Balochistan High Court (BHC) against the lack of progress. Subsequently, the ATC was directed to take up the case.
“I regularly appeared before the court since it started proceedings, and today I’m satisfied with the judgment,” Aftab Sherpao, who now heads the Qaumi Wattan Party in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, told journalists outside the court. “The court has dismissed all the charges against Musharraf and all those nominated in the case.”
A spokesman for Musharraf told AFP he was happy with the ruling, which “will restore the people’s confidence in the judiciary”. Musharraf also hopes to be acquitted in the other cases, which his spokesman said were “false and politically motivated”.
The Bugti family lawyer, Sohail Rajput, called it ‘one-sided justice and a joke’. “The defendant has been exonerated even though he didn’t appear [before the court] even once,” he said and vowed to challenge the verdict in the BHC.
“We had submitted a list of 26 witnesses but the court did not take them seriously,” he added. “We are at a loss to understand how the court could acquit Musharraf who it had indicted in a January 2015 hearing,” Rajput said.
In last hearing Jamil Bugti had revealed that Musharraf sought an apology for murdering his father in a message sent through his lawyer Akhtar Hussain Shah. “We won’t accept any apology,” he had told the court.
One of Akbar Bugti’s grandsons Barahamdagh Bugti, the head of the proscribed Baloch Republican Army, has been leading a separatist insurgency in Balochistan.
However, Barahamdagh, who is seeking political asylum in Switzerland, has lately indicated he is amenable to negotiations. Recently, officials said the government was working out a mechanism to bring estranged Baloch leaders back to Pakistan.
Fears abound that the ATC verdict might fuel insurgency which has slowed down in recent months due to the government’s carrot and stick policy. However, security analyst Lt Gen (retd) Talat Masood said there would not be significant fallout from the decision. “It’s a win-win situation both for the government and Musharraf,” he told.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 19th, 2016.
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