IHC gives interior ministry one more week to report about missing engineer. PHOTO: EXPRESS
ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court on Thursday expressed strong concerns about the lack of progress shown by state authorities in investigating the ‘enforced disappearance’ of a capital’s resident.
Justice Ather Minallah of the IHC, while hearing a petition on the disappearance of software engineer Sajid Mehmood from the capital, observed that when the son of the Chief Justice Sindh High Court went missing, the state had responded with full vigor. But when an ordinary citizen went missing, the state did nothing. He remarked that the rule of law requires that the “state should equally value the life and liberty of all citizens.”
“In today’s Pakistan this does not appear to be the case,” he lamented.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Interior once again failed to submit a report on affixing responsibility for Mehmood’s disappearance, a report which the court has sought at the last hearing of the case.
The court directed representatives of the ministry to submit its report within one week and to satisfy the court that it had made as much effort to recover the software engineer as was made in the cases of more ‘privileged’ citizens.
Justice Minallah expressed annoyance over how the police and the agencies have all claimed that they have no clue about Mehmood’s whereabouts. This is disturbing, the judge said, because Mehmood had not gone missing from the tribal areas or some far off corner of the country.
“He has gone missing from the heart of the federal capital,” Justice Minallah remarked, adding that someone must be held responsible for the matter.
Moreover, Islamabad High Court Bar Association President Tariq Mehmood Jehangiri, and eminent lawyer Babar Sattar were asked to assist the court in the case as amicus curaie.
The court asked the officials to submit what legal course of action a high court can adopt when confronted with such case where the state had failed to protect the life and liberty of citizens. Earlier, Justice Minallah had noted that apart from the Directorate of Military Intelligence, all other intelligence agencies said that neither Mehmood was in their custody nor were his whereabouts known.
The court had directed the secretary of the interior ministry to submit a report identifying those responsible for the failure to protect the allegedly abducted person and tracing his whereabouts.
Besides, the order had stated, the report shall also explain the actions taken so far in order to effectively investigate the matter.
Petitioner Mahera Sajid, through her counsel Umer Gilani, had alleged that her husband was “abducted from their home in F-10/1 [on March 14, 2016] amidst circumstance which strongly suggests that this is a case of enforced disappearance.”
She had made the secretaries of Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Interior, Inspector General of Police, DG Intelligence Bureau, Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate, a Military Intelligence and the SHO Shalimar Police Station respondents in the case.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 7th, 2016.
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