Compliance petition: CCPO asked why no action taken against cops

Inquiries found them guilty of torturing 3 teens.

LAHORE:

Additional District and Sessions Judge Malik Tariq Mehmood Zargham has sought a response from the capital city police officer (CCPO) to a petition seeking action against nine policemen found in two inquiries to have tortured, illegally detained, extorted bribes from and falsely accused three teenagers.

The judge took up on Wednesday a compliance petition filed by Sabira Bibi seeking departmental action as well as criminal cases against the station house officer (SHO), three sub inspectors (SIs) and five assistant sub inspectors (ASIs) of Mughalpura police.

Two inquiries conducted earlier on the orders of the CCPO and the deputy inspector general (DIG) for investigations found the charges against the policemen to be substantive and recommended that criminal charges be framed against them.



The petitioner said that her son Muhammad Mohsin, a matriculation student, and his friends Fahad Waseem and Fahad Ali were going to a market on a motorbike to buy some clothes when they were stopped at a police picket near the Mughalpura bridge on January 30.

The policemen, she said, beat them up and took them to the police station, where they were put in lock-up. They also took the students’ mobile phones and Rs2,300, she said. The three boys were detained for five days. They were tortured, she said, even though she had paid ASI Pervez Akhtar Rs10,000 and SI Rafaqat Rs5,000 in exchange for promises that they would not be harmed. Her son and his friends were also nominated as accused in 11 false cases, she said.

Police inquiries found that Assistant Sub Inspectors (ASIs) Pervez Akhtar, Hafeezullah, Mumtaz Hussain, Muhammad Ameen and Muhammad Arif falsely implicated the boys, while SIs Rafaqat, Ayub and Ashraf conducted a biased ‘investigation’ into the false cases. SHO Nasir Khan was found guilty of “faulty supervision” of the policemen.

The inquiries recommended that criminal charges be filed against them and that the cases against the students be dismissed.

In her compliance petition, Sabira Bibi submitted that the policemen, despite the findings of the two inquiries, had not been dismissed nor subjected to departmental action, nor charged with criminal offences.

She said that the police were protecting their colleagues and asked the court to order cases against them.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 31^st, 2013.