KARACHI, Oct 24: The Sindh High Court’s acquittal of Gul Hasan, the alleged mastermind of the twin suicide attacks on Haideri Masjid and the Imambargah Ali Raza, is clear evidence of poor investigation techniques employed by the police and the intelligence agencies which rely overwhelmingly on ocular evidence and instead of making a strong case, fail to establish their arguments before the superior judiciary.
Well-placed sources in the police department hold the intelligence agencies responsible for ruining the prosecution of high-profile terrorism cases since they work above the law. “The agencies arrest the accused people and keep them in custody for a long time without showing their arrest. When the suspects are finally handed over to the police, it is too late to formulate a strong case that can be proved before the courts,” said sources.
The acquittal of Mr Hasan is just one of the many examples – a number of other accused persons have also earlier been acquitted by the trial courts or superior judiciary due to the prosecution’s failure to establish their case.
To date, however, the government has not taken action against a single official responsible for the poor investigation of high-profile cases that were dismissed by the superior courts. Clearly, the acquittal of Mr Hasan, alleged to be a militant of the banned Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ), means the court found him innocent.
Requesting anonymity, senior police officials insisted that their job is limited to proving their case in the trial courts and they have nothing to do with the appeal process, which they claimed is basically the job of state lawyers. “An anti-terrorism court relied on the prosecution story, found Gul Hasan guilty and awarded him death sentence,” said a senior police official associated with the investigation of the case.
However, he had no answer to a trial court’s acquittal of LJ chief Akram Lahori in the murder of the managing director of PSO.
Lahori was accused of and tried for killing PSO managing director Shaukat Raza Mirza. On April 30, 2003, he was exonerated by ATC judge Khan Parvaiz Chang and in February this year, a state appeal against his acquittal was also dismissed by an anti-terrorism appellate bench of the Sindh High Court.
Out-dated investigation techniques
While the common impression is that in several high-profile cases, the police booked innocent people in order to ease government and public pressure or for obtaining reward money and promotions, the officials did not completely agree. They said that before filing a case in a court of law, almost everyone arrested in terrorism cases was interrogated by a joint interrogation team comprised of members from the police and intelligence outfits. “The majority of the police officials are not working for the sake of reward money or promotion,” said the official.
Expressing dismay over the decade-old procedure of investigation, officials said that even today, the investigation branch of police relied mainly on ocular evidence to prove its case before the trial court. They alleged that the investigation branch of the police often used policemen or informers as eyewitnesses who testified before the trial court which, in turn, found an accused guilty of the charges. However, when appeals were taken up before the superior judiciary, the judges gave the benefit of the doubt to convicts after examining minor contradictions in the prosecution’s arguments.
Sources in the investigation police told Dawn that due to the intelligence agencies and some wings of the police, it was difficult to prove important points before the court. They maintained that under the law, a person had to be produced before a court of law within 24 hours of his arrest. However, they claimed, the intelligence agencies kept an accused person in custody for weeks and later handed him over to the police for a formal arrest. “How can we make a strong case when the timing of the arrest of an accused comes into dispute?” asked an official of police investigations. “We have no option other than to make a strong prosecution story to get them convicted.”
Citing the example of the arrest of those involved in the 2002 US Consulate bomb blast, sources said that the Pakistan Rangers arrested Mohammed Imran and Mohammed Hanif, the alleged chief and deputy chief of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen al-Alami, kept them in their custody for interrogation and then handed them over to the investigation police. “We did our best to make a good case and the trial court convicted them,” said an investigation official.
However, in November last year the Sindh High Court acquitted four alleged al-Alami militants, including the chief and his deputy, in the US consulate bombing case.
A senior police official told Dawn that despite the acquittal of several militants by the superior judiciary, the police, intelligence agencies and the government still believed that they were guilty of involvement in terrorism incidents. “Therefore, the government never took action against those who were behind the arrests of such militants,” he added.
Although the prosecution managed to prove its case before the trial courts in the cases regarding the killings of former Sindh Governor Hakim Mohammed Said and four US engineers of Union Texas Pakistan, the superior judiciary set aside the convictions of the accused who belonged to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement.
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