Al-Azizia reference: Wajid Zia produces Qatari prince's letter in court

NAB prosecution team irked by defence lawyer's objections

ISLAMABAD: Prosecution witness Wajid Zia, who headed the Joint Investigation Team which probed the Sharif family’s offshore assets, continued recording his statement in Al-Azizia reference on Friday.

Al-Azizia is the second reference behind heard in the accountability court in Islamabad. Judge Muhammad Bashir presided over the Avenfield reference hearings, and is currently hearing Zia's statement in the second reference.



Zia produced the original letter of Hamad Bin Jassim which was dated July 17, 2017, and addressed to JIT. Copies of cover letters of the Qatari prince were also produced before the court. The defence team raised objections that the documents did not bear a stamp or seal of the officials signing the said documents.

Zia also produced attested copy of the response JIT received from the United Arab Emirates upon its request for Mutual Legal Assistance (MLA) dated June 28, 2017. A copy of the Arabic version of the MLA response was also placed before the court. Attested copy of a chart reflecting major transaction in accounts of Nawaz, daughter Maryam Nawaz from son Hussain Nawaz and Hill Metals was also produced. The court, however, directed the witness to produce a legible copy of the chart.

The defense again raised an objection that this document qualified as part of the JIT investigation report and therefore was not admissible in evidence.

Nawaz’s lawyer Khawaja Haris continued raising objections to Zia’s statements, which irked the prosecution team led by NAB prosecutor Sardar Muzaffar Abbasi. “This is wasting the court’s time and disrupting the tempo of the witness. These objections are unnecessary,” Abbasi protested.

NAB prosecutor urged the defence team to limit their objections to a few words instead of who paragraphs, but Haris responded that he had to give legal grounds to explain each of his objections and could not simply say ‘inadmissible’ to each statement of Zia he had an objection to.



“Should I leave the courtroom so that objections too could be recorded by the prosecution team?” Haris retorted back at prosecutors.

To most of the defenCe objections, the prosecution simply had one word to say: misconceived. The court will take up the case again on Monday morning to continue recording Zia’s statement.