KESC seige: ATC hands case over to sessions court, scrapes terrorism charges

Over 400 KESC employees still face a number of charges.

KARACHI: The terrorism charges against the 30 Karachi Electric Supply Company employees in police custody have been dropped, making the case triable by a sessions court.

The Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) was hearing a case about the attack on the KESC head office on August 29. Thirty of the accused, including labour leader Akhlaq Ahmed, are in custody while the remaining 400 men implicated in the case are still at large.

The court had already heard from Syed Haider Imam Rizvi, who is representing the workers, and Special Public Prosecutor Arshad Iqbal Cheema. It has also seen unedited video footage of the incident provided by two private television networks.

Rizvi questioned the inclusion of Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act 1997 (ATA), using the argument that none of his clients were shown firing at the police or KESC officials in the footage shown to the court by the prosecution.

The ATC Karachi division’s Administrative Judge Justice Maqbool Baqar ordered that Section 7 be deleted. The AJ ordered the case’s Investigating Officer to submit the charge sheet against before a different magistrate as it is now a Sessions trial.

Earlier, KESC’s lawyer had supported the inclusion of the section, claiming that the accused damaged property, held dozens of fasting employees hostage for hours, injured KESC guards and attacked the police when they tried to rescue the people stranded inside the head office.

The AJ said that all these acts fall under the sections in which the accused were booked, including Section 7 of the ATA. The FIR, No. 330/2011, was registered by KESC Chief Security Officer Lt Col (Rtd) Asif Saeed at Defence police station according to KESC’s version of events. The men were booked under sections 147,148, 149, 186, 324, 353, 342, 435, 427/ 34 of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) read with Section 7 of the ATA.

ASI Muhammad Afzal filed a second FIR with the same police station for the State under sections 353, 324, 435, 427 and 34 of the PPC.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th,  2011.