Quetta carnage: Lawyers to approach SC for making findings part of order

Interior ministry also upset for not expunging remarks against Nisar, ministry

ISLAMABAD: Dissatisfied with the Supreme Court detailed order in August 8, 2016 Quetta carnage suo motu case, lawyers from Balochistan will approach the Supreme Court for making Justice Qazi Faez Isa’s findings as head of the Quetta Commission part of the apex court’s order.

Five days after disposing of the case, the SC three-judge bench, headed by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, on Monday issued a five-page written order which said findings of the commission at its para 17 were based upon observations of the commission and “they are not to be treated as findings of this court.”

Talking to The Express Tribune, Balochistan Bar Council member Munir Kakar said lawyers are upset over the court’s recent judgment, which has held that Justice Qazi Faez Isa’s findings against former interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan are not to be treated as findings of the apex court.



“Senior representatives of provincial bar councils held meeting after the issuance of the written order and it has been decided that a review petition through senior counsel Hamid Khan will be filed against the court’s order,” he said.

Kakar wondered why the commission’s recommendations were not made part of the judicial order. “A generation of lawyers was eliminated in the bomb blast. We want that the commission’s recommendations be made part of the order so that they may be binding on the executive,” he said.

He lamented that there is less representation of Balochistan in the apex court as only one judge [Justice Isa] belongs to the province. He asked why the provincial high court judges are not being elevated to SC.

Kakar revealed that those nine judges from Balochistan, who worked as the SC judges in the past, were not living in Balochistan and now they had been settled in Punjab and other provinces. “There should be real representation of the province in the Supreme Court,” he added.

A senior official in Interior Ministry has also expressed concern that the apex court did not expunge remarks against the ministry and the former interior minister Nisar. “However, it is yet to decide whether or not to file a review petition against the court’s order,” he added.

In 2016, the Supreme Court appointed Justice Qazi Faez Isa as one-man judicial commission to probe into the August 8, 2016 suicide blast on the premises of a Quetta hospital that resulted in the killing of over 70 people mostly lawyers.



The commission, in paragraph 17 of its report, observed that Nisar had displayed little sense of ministerial responsibility as he called only one meeting of executive committee of the National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta) in over three-and-a-half years.

It had also accused the former interior minister of violating decisions of the Nacta executive committee and meeting head of a proscribed organization. It also noted that Nisar accepted the demands of the proscribed organisation regarding CNICs, Inexplicably delayed proscribing terrorist organisations, and failed to proscribe a well-known terrorist organisation.

Attorney General for Pakistan Ashtar Ausaf Ali appearing before the bench on January 8 took exception to the contents of the same paragraph of the findings and said the observations were person-specific and uncalled for as Nisar was afforded any opportunity of hearing.