Order in the court: Cable guys brawl at Sessions Court

Case registered against 100 for disrupting courts, beating police.

LAHORE:

Some 100 men from rival cable television providers engaged in running battles all over the Sessions Court on Saturday after a hearing in a murder trial involving employees from the two groups.

Saeed Shah, Zahid Javaid Butt, Arif Butt, Sohail Butt, Chaudhry Shahbaz and Mehmood Shah have been accused of murdering Muhammad Waqas. Waqas worked for the Ali Imran group, which competes for business with the Saeed Shah group in Gujjarpura.

But Waqas’s brothers M Imran, M Irfan and M Bashir testified before Additional District and Sessions Judge Hamid Hussain on Saturday that they did not believe the six were involved in the killing.

Men from the Ali Imran group were outraged at the brothers’ testimony and slapped and beat them inside the courtroom. Men from the Saeed Shah group stepped in to protect the brothers.

The fighting quickly spiralled out of control. The judge fled to his retiring room while the fighters locked the courtroom doors and continued their brawl. Staffers in other courtrooms locked their doors so the thugs couldn’t get inside. Some got into the retiring room and fought there, others in the corridor leading from the retiring room to the building exit and entrance used by judges. Litigants screamed and took shelter to avoid becoming collateral damage. There was a massive melee at the judges’ gate in which plainclothes policemen were also beaten up as they tried to stop the fighting.

The brawl lasted about half an hour. By the time the police, led by City SP Anwar Khetran, Islampura SHO Muhammad Ameen and Islampura DSP Shakeel Khokhar, arrived at the courts, the fighters had fled. A case was later registered at Islampura police station under Sections 147, 186, 506, 353 and 148 of the Pakistan Penal Code, against 100 unidentified people, for interrupting court work and fighting with police officials.

District and Sessions Judge Mujahid Mustaqeem Ahmed appointed ADSJ Arif Hameed Sheikh to conduct an inquiry into the incident.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 11^th, 2011.