LAHORE, July 27: The Lahore High Court on Tuesday rejected a plea made by a senior Punjab government law officer that investigation record of the Sialkot Jail case should not be made public.

A division bench, comprising Justice Khwaja Mohammad Sharif and Justice Rustam Ali Malik, observed that it was for the court to decide if the record would be made public or not. The court ordered production of the complete investigation record of the case by July 30.

The court was hearing an appeal for cancellation of the bail granted to 18 police and medical officers, including DIG Malik Mohammad Iqbal, DPO (Sialkot) Amjad Javed Saleemi, DPO (Gujrat) Raja Munawwar Husain, Dr Sajjad Husain and Dr Mohammad Firdaus Shah of the Allama Iqbal Memorial Hospital, Sialkot.

The court would hear on Sept 7 an appeal filed by Additional District and Sessions Judge (Faisalabad) Mohammad Yousuf Aujla who was the senior civil judge of Sialkot when the firing incident took place in the jail on July 25 last year, resulting in the death of four civil judges.

The court had ordered production of the record on the last date of hearing. The investigation was carried out by three different officers, and it included a judicial probe conducted by the then Lahore High Court registrar and now Justice Sheikh Abdur Rashid.

At the outset of proceedings on Tuesday, Additional Advocate-General Mohammad Hanif Khatana submitted that the Punjab government had submitted complete record of the investigation and it was available with the LHC registrar. He submitted that sensitivity of the record warranted that it should not be made public.

The court asked the AAG under which law the record was being kept secret and why was its order not being implemented. The registrar was an officer of the court and he should have submitted the record to the court, it was observed.

Defence counsel Syed Ghulam Abbas Bokhari submitted that the government could not claim any privilege regarding any part of the record and was bound to abide by the law. He submitted that the investigation report was judicial record and the government was obliged under the law to submit it to the court.

HASHMI CASE: The National Accountability Bureau has submitted details of the property which PML-N leader Javed Hashmi allegedly purchased in the name of his nine relatives.