Law and order: Rival gangs brawl at Sessions Court

Lawyers beat up policeman for security lapse.

LAHORE:

Four men were injured in a knife fight between rival gangs at the Sessions Court here on Tuesday. Some lawyers later thrashed a police official for not taking appropriate security measures.

The fight began after members of the ‘Gujjar group’ and ‘Butt group’ gathered at a lawyer’s chambers, apparently in an attempt at reconciliation mediated by Advocate Amir Butt, witnesses said.

They had earlier attended a pre-arrest bail hearing at the court of Additional District and Sessions Judge Munir Ahmed, for an attempted murder case in which members of the Gujjar group were accused of shooting a man named Humayun Butt.

The attempted mediation failed as the rival gang members began exchanging angry words. They soon began fighting and some of them also fired guns in the air, but not at each other, said the witnesses.

Members of both groups called in reinforcements and the courts complex soon became a battlefield, with hand-to-hand combat and knife fights all over the place. Four men of the Butt group  Muhammad Arsalan, Salman, Usama and Rizwan – received stab wounds, none of them serious.

As more police officials arrived at the scene and the fighting died down, some lawyers set upon Sub Inspector Abdus Sami, beating him and tearing his uniform. They accused him of failing to take appropriate security measures to prevent men bringing weapons into the courts complex.



Asked if he would file a complaint against the lawyers, Sami said that the matter was being discussed with senior officials. He refused to name the lawyers who had attacked him.

Islampura police, on the complaint of Irshad Chaudhry of the Butt group, registered a case regarding Tuesday’s brawl under Sections 324 (attempted murder), 148 (rioting armed with a deadly weapon), 149 (conspiracy), 427 (mischief causing damage) of the Pakistan Penal Code and Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act against Bobby Gujjar, Aurangzeb, Malik Sameer, Farooq Gujjar, Muhammad Nadeem, Asif, Sarfaraz, Azeem, Irfan and 10 unidentified men.

Police later said that they had arrested Bobby Gujjar, Aurangzeb, Shehzad, Asif and Farooq.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 30^th, 2013.