Case registered over online campaign against IHC judges

Justice Athar Minallah and Justice Miangul Hassan are hearing Sharifs’ appeals against conviction

ISLAMABAD: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Wednesday registered an FIR against unidentified persons for uploading “false and malicious” material on social media against two Islamabad High Court (IHC) judges, namely Justice Athar Minallah and Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb.

The two judges have been hearing a petition by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his family members against their conviction by an accountability court over their London properties.

It emerged during the hearing of the petition that a campaign was launched against the two judges. When the judges noticed that, they directed the FIA to trace those involved in it. Thereafter, the IHC registrar also wrote a letter to the DG FIA to look into the issue.

The FIR, mentioning the IHC registrar’s letter, states that “false, fabricated and malicious material” had been uploaded on social media and it had gone viral during the course of the hearing of high-profile cases.

A technical analysis report – obtained from Muhammad Salman, the in-charge of Cyber Crime Reporting Centre, FIA, Islamabad – shows that three YouTube videos and one Facebook account were provided to find the identity of the users.



According to the FIR, the videos in question had been uploaded on a YouTube Channel titled “The One Man Army’ with a URL www.youtube.com/channel/UCICrlCmhm4qeEw3bQSXktwQ/about. The channel was created on April 7 this year and has a massive viewership, nearly 3.17 million. The social media channel was run by someone with an alias of ‘Chacha Shakoor’.

According to the Facebook page of ‘Chacha Shakoor’, his “real name” is Abdul Shakoor Ajmal and he also runs other social media accounts on Facebook and Dailymotion.

The website’s analysis shows that it was registered with GoDadday, a US-based web service provider. The ownership of the website in question was concealed. The same website was registered on February 10 this year and the registrant’s address of the website shows that the owner lived in Dubai.



The FIA says that it has sent the court order to Facebook, asking its administration to provide the subscriber’s details of the Facebook account. Replies from Facebook and Youtube are still awaited.

Moreover, Godaddy was also contacted to provide the ownership data of the website. The service provider had created a complaint ID and a reply was still awaited, according to the FIR.

The matter has also been taken up with the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).

According to the FIR, the suspect, under the alias of ‘Chacha Shakoor’, spoke “nasty, filthy, unethical, derogatory language/remarks against judges of superior judiciary as well as other dignitaries of the country without any lawful and reasonable justification which amounted to creating a sense of fear, panic and insecurity in the government, general public and society”.