Fits and starts justice
The May 12, 2007 massacre in Karachi with a toll of 50
people killed and 100 wounded has never been brought to conclusion in our
courts of justice. The mayhem at the hands of gunmen who attacked the rallies
of political parties, lawyers and others wanting to proceed to the airport to
greet deposed Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, who
had arrived in the city to address a lawyers’ gathering, forced the CJP to
remain stranded inside the airport for nine hours, after which he returned
without having set foot outside the airport. Current Karachi Mayor Waseem
Akhtar of the MQM, who was Home Adviser to the Sindh chief minister at the
time, was finally formally indicted in one of the four cases before an
anti-terrorism court (ATC), along with 19 others. Waseem Akhtar and 18 others
are on bail, while one of the accused is in jail. Although a total of seven
cases of rioting, attempted murder, terrorism, etc, were filed in two ATCs
against these 20, with 16 others declared absconders, no breakthrough in
investigations forced the court to proceed with just the one indictment. This
too should be considered a small mercy since the cases have dragged on for 11
years without any end in sight. A recounting of the sequence of events since
2007 could help put the delays in perspective. Waseem Akhtar and others were
arrested in July 2016 (nine years after the May 12 events) after their
pre-arrest bail plea was rejected by the ATC. In October 2016, the ATC granted
him bail and exemption from personal appearance, a generosity that depreciated
the seriousness of the charges. The ATC had cause to rue that generosity when
it had to defer indictment of the accused four times as they failed to turn up
together. At the last hearing, the ATC finally felt constrained to rescind the
exemption from personal appearance. Four cases in ATC-II and three in ATC-III
remained pending interminably as investigators expressed their helplessness
before the courts regarding progress in the investigation. The cases did take a
dramatic turn when the Rangers arrested Kamran Farooq, an MQM MPA, on December
16, 2016, who was absconding in several cases pertaining to the May 12 carnage.
Farooq’s confessional statement before a judicial magistrate pointed the finger
of responsibility at the MQM leadership, including party leader Farooq Sattar. Not
surprisingly, the MQM leadership rejected Farooq’s confessional statement.
Since then, and up to the present, the MQM leadership and Waseem Akhtar in
particular have been trying to deflect the serious charges against them by
calling for impartial investigations into the real perpetrators of the
violence, an end to ‘fake’ cases filed as political vendetta, and the reopening
of cases such as the Hyderabad Pucca Qila and Ali Garh incidents. No one can
oppose the investigation and prosecution of all such cases from the past, but
if the MQM believes this stance will somehow help it wriggle off the hook, that
hope may finally be coming to an end.
Once again, the lack of progress in even such an important
case glaringly throws up the woes of our judicial system. The ATCs were set up
precisely to circumvent the snail’s progress in our normal courts system, but
the inertia of our judicial procedures, incompetent or negligent (deliberate or
inadvertent) investigation, and the inability of our prosecution regime to
serve the ends of justice in a timely and efficacious manner provides more than
adequate loopholes for the accused to subvert justice through interminable
delays. Interestingly, the current CJP Saqib Nisar has lit the fire under many
institutions for poor governance of late. Similarly, it his proactive
intervention that has brought the Asghar Khan case and now this May 12 massacre
case out of the deep freeze to which they remained confined year after year. Estimable
as this proactive stance of the CJP and the Supreme Court is, it points to the
need for serious examination and reform of the judicial system to shake it out
of the lethargy that has seen two million cases pending in the courts. Is there
any need to remind the honourable CJP and His Lordships of the old and well
worn adage: justice delayed is justice denied?
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