CM Shehbaz Sharif. PHOTO: AFP
The petition was filed by senior lawyer, Advocate Chaudhary Shoaib Saleem, who contended the Model Town judicial commission had declared the affidavit submitted by Punjab CM as false in which he claimed he ordered the police to stop the operation.
He said the evidence submitted by CM did not establish his claim of passing such an order.
He contended that provincial law minister Rana Sanaullah also gave contradictory statements before the commission. He said both the accused hid facts and now they were neither Sadiq nor Ameen.
Model Town tragedy: LHC asks govt to make inquiry report public
He prayed the court to disqualify both under Article 62(1)(f) of the 1973 Constitution. The petitioner stated that brief facts for filing of this writ petition were that the Honorable Justice of the Lahore High Court, Justice Ali Baqir Najfi, headed an inquiry tribunal to investigate the unfortunate incident in Model Town on 17 June, 2014, in which at least 14 citizens, including women, were killed by police while many others were injured.
He said the Inquiry Tribunal completed its report and handed it over to the Punjab government on August 9, 2014. However, it was kept under wraps until a full bench of the Lahore High Court, on December 05, 2017, ordered that it be made public.
The government complied with the order of the full bench and made the inquiry report public. The tribunal extensively discussed the affidavits of all the parties except Pakistan Awami Tehreek, reports of the police, ISI, Special Branch and other law enforcement agencies.
The tribunal, in its conclusion from page 65 to 74 of the inquiry report, established that Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif (Respondent 3) and Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah (Respondent 4) made false statements before the tribunal, general public and in press conferences.
Recalling the gruesome events of June 17, 2014, in Model Town, the judicial tribunal observed that the Punjab police had done exactly what “it went for”. The police, it said, had “actively” participated in the “massacre” and keeping in view the “facts and circumstances, the reader of the report can easily fix the responsibility of the unfortunate incident”.
The inquiry tribunal accused the Punjab government of concealing facts and hindering the investigation, while its officials tried to cover up for each other, preventing the investigating body from arriving at a definitive conclusion.
In its conclusions, the report noted that a meeting was held on June 16 (a day before the incident), which was attended by then law minister Rana Sanaullah, the chief secretary, home secretary, the commissioner of Lahore and the capital city police officer (CCPO) and representatives of the special branch. They decided “not to allow Tahirul Qadri to fulfil his objective (a sit-in at the federal capital on June 23).”
As per the report, it was the Lahore commissioner who pointed out that the “barriers” around Minhajul Quran were illegal and he “treated them as [an] encroachment”. The chair, (Rana Sanaullah), in a meeting held on July 16, 2014, decided that those barriers must be removed and Tauqeer Shah (then secretary to the CM) “consented on behalf of the chief minister”.
Model Town incident: Punjab challenges LHC verdict to make inquiry report public
“The participants of the meeting had overlooked the fact that the barriers had been “placed after [seeking] permission from the High Court back in 2011 and [they] had been there for three years without any complaints from the residents.” The report continued that the meeting appeared to have provided the context for the brutal action taken against PAT workers the next day. On June 17, the police moved to remove those barriers and during this exercise the police retaliated and resorted to firing at the protesters. The tribunal wrote “Admittedly, such [a] level of [an] offensive by the police, by any stretch of imagination, was not commensurate with the level of resistance by the unarmed PAT workers.”
As per the report, the operation planned and designed under the chairmanship of the law minister (Rana Sanaullah), which resulted in gruesome killings, could have easily been avoided. The police action of severely beating people on the crime scene is irrefutably suggestive that the “police did exactly for which they were sent and gathered over there.”
About fixing responsibility on who had ordered the police to open fire, the report says the level of cooperation they had received while trying to dig out the truth was evident from the fact that: “no police official from top to bottom, whether (he) participated in the operation or not, uttered a single word about the person under whose command the police resorted to firing. Understandably, all were in unison in withholding the information from this tribunal”.
The petitioner asked that the report be accepted and the Punjab chief minister and law minister be disqualified as members of the provincial sssembly (MPAs) in the light of Article 62(1)(f) of the Constitution in the interest of justice, equality and fair play.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 15th, 2017.
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