Pay your way out: Man smuggling drugs gets bail

KARACHI: The judicial magistrate granted bail on Thursday to a man, Muhammad Waseem, arrested for smuggling drugs to Phillipines via a courier service. Anjum Ali, the manager of Sky Net Worldwide Express, tipped the police off about a suspicious parcel booked at a branch of his company. The Anti-Narcotics Force reached the office and seized the packet. Inside it, they found 145 tablets of Onyx, concealed in three mouse pads, three ID cards and a key chain. Waseem was arrested after the police read his address on the packet going to Philippines.  His lawyer, Khalid Mehmood Ali, said that the police had implicated Waseem in the case just to please the high officials. “The police couldn’t produce any private witness except the witnesses mentioned in the FIR who were also police personnel,” Ali argued. Two FIRs had been registered for the case. However, the first judicial magistrate of Malir, Muhammad Ashfaque Moghal, granted bail against a sum of Rs60,000 for both cases. The next hearing has been fixed for August 16.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 10^th, 2012.