LHC slams Interior Ministry

LHC has criticised the Interior Ministry for submitting “stereotype reports and comments” in missing persons...

LAHORE: Chief Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif of the Lahore High Court has criticised the Interior Ministry for submitting “stereotype reports and comments” in missing persons cases.

The chief justice was conducting proceedings on a petition from one Naureen Ijaz, who believes her husband is being secretly and illegally detained by intelligence agencies.

He ordered the defence secretary and home secretary to reply to the charges in the petition by August 9. At the previous hearing, the court had issued similar orders to the Interior Ministry, but Justice Sharif was disappointed by the response.

“I have gone through the Interior Ministry’s report. In every writ petition in such matters, they are submitting a stereotype report and parawise comments,” he said on Monday.

Ali Muhammad Malik, section officer of the Interior Ministry, said in his written reply that none of the 15 departments and agencies operating under the ministry had arrested or detained Ijaz Hussain, the missing businessman.

Malik said the Rangers did not have the authority to detain suspects.

They were supposed to hand over any suspects they arrested to the local police. The Rangers director general had told the ministry that the force had not arrested Hussain either, he said.

Toqeer Majeed Chaudhry, assistant director of the National Crisis Management Cell of the Interior Ministry, also appeared before the court on Monday.

The petitioner, a resident of Lahore Cantt, said she had not seen her husband since July 6, 2010. On that day, four men in plain clothes had come to Hussain’s factory, which produces rubber parts, in Kot Lakhpat, she said.

They had wanted to speak to Qari Obaidullah, one of the 15 labourers at the factory, she said.

They spent some time talking with him and then took Obaidullah and Hussain with them, she said. After spending two days looking for her husband, she came across reports in local newspapers on July 8 that the police had arrested two suspected terrorists, one of them identified as Qari Obaidullah, from Kot Lakhpat.

Ijaz said her husband was innocent and if the security agencies had arrested him, they should produce him in a court. She urged the LHC to order that her husband be produced in court.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 10^th, 2010.