Video scandal suspect sent to Adiala for 14 days

FIA claims it recovered a Land Cruiser from one of Mian Tariq Mehmood’s Multan residences

ISLAMABAD: Mian Tariq Mehmood, the main accused in a video scandal surrounding an accountability court judge, was sent to jail on a 14-day judicial custody after a magistrate in Islamabad rejected the Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) request to further extend his remand.

Islamabad’s Accountability Court-II Judge Arshad Malik – who convicted former prime minister Nawaz Sharif in Al-Azizia case – submitted on July 12 an affidavit to the Islamabad High Court (IHC), alleging that family of the former premier tried to bribe him into making his own verdict controversial.

The judge had also claimed that he was also tried to be blackmailed.
“Mian Tariq [Mehmood], an old acquaintance from the time I was serving in Multan as additional district and sessions judge from 2000-2003, showed me a secretly recorded and manipulated immoral video in a compromising position saying that is it you doing this when you were serving in Multan,” he said.

The judge had claimed that Mehmood told him to record an audio message, sayinghe delivered the [Al-Azizia] verdict to appease the ‘ruling elite’ under an immense pressure and that substantial evidence was not available against the former prime minister.

The accountability court judge’s affidavit appeared after the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Maryam Nawaz on July 6 unveiled a controversial video in which Arshad Malik could be seen confessing before a PML-N worker that he was blackmailed into convicted Nawaz Sharif.

The FIA on July 17 arrested Mehmood from Islamabad and presented him before a Judicial Magistrate Shaista Kundi who remanded him in the FIA custody for a total period of five days.

However, on Monday, the judge rejected the FIA’s plea to further extent remand period and ordered to send the accused to Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail for 14 day on a judicial remand that will end on August 5.

The judge also ordered the jail authorities to take good care of his health after the accused claimed that he is suffering from a brain tumor and would die in jail.

Taking to journalists present in jail premises after the hearing, Mehmood said the FIA had not provided forensic report of the Multan video. He also rejected the FIA’s claim that it had recovered a Land Cruiser from one of his residences in Multan.

To a question as to what price he charged for his video, he said he never made any video. “I neither charged Rs10million nor Rs10,000 for the video. I never made any video,” he said, but added in the breath that “My video has not surfaced yet.”