No mercy for extremists: LHC

LAHORE:

Fanatics do not deserve any relief from the court, Lahore High Court (LHC) said last week dismissing a bail application by a cleric booked for violating a ban on use of loudspeakers. The counsel for Ahmed Sher Sabir Al-Qadri’s later helped him flee the court.

The lawyer said police had registered an FIR against Qadri based on malafide. He said police had held grudge against him and implicated him in a false case.

A law officer told the court Quaidabad police had registered the FIR under Section 6 of the Loud Speaker Act. He said on receiving information from some locals, police had raided and arrested the prayer leader for using four loudspeakers at a mosque. The judge dismissed the application and gave police the go ahead to arrest Qadri. The cleric exited the courtroom with his lawyer and fled before he could be arrested.

Stopped from travelling

The LHC sought a report last week from the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on a petition by two Christian siblings accusing the agency of twice stopping them board a Sri Lanka-bound flight because “they intended to seek asylum”.

The petitioners said FIA officials had stopped them from boarding the flights claiming they were going to seek asylum in Sri Lanka. They said they had valid visas and had fulfilled all requirements to travel abroad.

Petitioners Irfan Masih and his sister Maria Batool, residents of Kasur, said they had been invited to visit Sri Lanka by a family friend, KA Nalika Damayanthi, a Sri Lankan national. Their counsel, Advocate Mushtaq Gill, said the petitioners had obtained visas and sponsor letters after due process. He said they had purchased tickets of Mihin Lanka (PVT) Ltd, a Sri Lankan airline, for departure on May 12 from Lahore to Colombo. At Allama Iqbal International Airport, FIA officials stopped them and asked them if they had certain documents on them.

He said that they showed them the documents but the officials did not allow them to board the plane.

He said a few days later, they had bought new tickets and tried to board a flight to Colombo on June 1 from Allama Iqbal International Airport. They received their boarding cards but were once again stopped from boarding the flight. He said FIA officials had snatched their boarding passes and told them that several Pakistani Christians had travelled to Thailand, Malaysia and Sri Lanka to seek asylum. Therefore, they were told they would not be allowed to leave the country.

Gill said citizens whose passports mentioned Christian religion were often asked to provide assurance that they were not travelling abroad to seek asylum. Gill said when he was travelling to Italy in December 2014, he had been approached by some FIA officials at the airport who claimed that he was intending to seek asylum in Italy. “I was allowed to travel after I asked some officers to intervene,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 9^th, 2015.