Discharged from service: IHC turns down ex-ASF official’s plea

Declares petition against military court sentence non-maintainable

ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court (IHC) dismissed on Monday a petition of an ex-official of the Airport Security Force (ASF) who had challenged his sentence by a military court.

The judge dismissed the petition declaring it non-maintainable.

The appellant, Allah Ditta, a resident of Okara, had contended that he had been dismissed from service under the Army Act, arguing that the law was not applicable to him and hence he had been sentenced under a “wrong law”.

Ditta, an assistant sub-inspector of ASF, was court-martialed in 1999 after he “slapped” and used “filthy language” against his company commander, Muhammad Tariq Khan, at the Karachi airport when his request for leave was allegedly turned down ahead of Eid.

He was eventually demoted to a rank of a guard, dismissed from service and sent to a civil jail where he spent one year in rigorous imprisonment.

In January 2000, an appellate forum of the ASF rejected his appeal while terming it being devoid of merit.

“The petitioner has been awarded three penalties on a trivial charge,” his counsel Muhammad Bashir Khan argued in the petition.

Ditta in his petition named the aviation division secretary, the chief security officer and the force commander of the Quaid-e-Azam International Airport as respondents in the case.

Khan said that according to the annals of the law, a punishment aims at correction and may not be such that deprive a civil servant of the right of earning a livelihood.

The lawyer further said that his client has been jobless since his dismissal. The counsel stated that Ditta was inducted in the ASF in 1982, while chapter IV of the Army Act was added to the ASF ACT in 1984 through an ordinance called ASF (Amendment) Ordinance 1984.

According to the General Clauses Act, Khan said, an act comes into force on the day of promulgation and no act, amendment, notification and policy can be applied retrospectively.

The counsel said that his client has been vigilantly pursuing the remedy since dismissal.

He had prayed to the court that the impugned order may be set aside and the petitioner may be reinstated in service with back benefits.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2016.