Hearing of petition against Tori Bund Commission adjourned

SHC directs provincial law officer to submit commission report at next hearing.

KARACHI: The hearing of a constitutional petition challenging the two-member commission probing the alleged breaches in the Tori Bund and M S Bund was adjourned till October 29 by a division bench of the Sindh High Court on Friday.

The bench also directed the provincial law officer representing the Sindh government to submit the report by the two-member commission before the next hearing.

The petition was filed by a former MNA and a Supreme Court senior advocate, Abdul Mujeeb Pirzada, who appealed to the court to stay the commission’s proceedings immediately, as record tampering was apprehended by the petitioner.

The commission’s proceedings are being kept secret, the petitioner maintained in an application for a stay of proceedings (to halt further legal process in a trial) by the commission.

Suing the two members of the commission, Justice (retd) Zahid Kurban Alvi and Justice (retd) Ghulam Nabi Soomro, the petitioner said the commission was illegally constituted and therefore, it is powerless to decide such an important issue. The commission should have been constituted under the Federal Act of 1966, which is the only legal instrument available so far, the petitioner submitted.

Advocate Pirzada maintained that he filed the petition on behalf of “the seven million people of Sindh” who were forced to leave their homes due to a man-made disaster. He stated in the petition that breaches were caused to save the sugar mill owned by Senator Islamuddin Shaikh, the agricultural land of federal minister Syed Khursheed Shah, the flour mill of Special Assistant to Sindh Chief Minister Pehlaj Rai, the agricultural lands of MPA Syed Javed Shah and other influential people.

“I have demanded compensation to the families of hundreds of flash floods victims due to [the] breaches,” he said, adding that standing crops over 2.5 million acres of land were devastated due to these breaches.

The government, in its written reply, has denied that the breaches were caused and claimed that bunds were protected, but due to unprecedented rains in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh, the record flow of water into rivers resulted in the worst ever devastation to farmland and cities.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 23^rd, 2010.