ISLAMABAD: A judge of the Supreme Court said on Monday he wondered what was the need of seeking opinion of the court on the controversial execution of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto when even a bigger verdict had already been given by the entire nation, the country and history.
“In this case the country, the nation and history may have given a verdict which is a bigger verdict then why they are seeking opinion from the court when the verdict has already been given,” Justice Mohammad Sair Ali observed.
But Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who heads an 11-judge bench hearing a presidential reference sent to the court for revisiting the murder case of the PPP founder, observed that by referring the reference President Asif Ali Zardari as well as Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had shown faith in the Supreme Court.
But he hastened to add that in such situations the court could not do more than adopting certain procedures and asked why the prime minister did not rise to the occasion by introducing a bill to highlight the injustice done to Mr Bhutto.
The chief justice was apparently referring to certain legislations adopted by countries like Britain and the United States where it had been held that such legislations could be person-specific, but the Indian judiciary had gone even a step further by holding that such laws were subject to judicial review where the court could even strike down any findings.
Attorney General Maulvi Anwarul Haq informed the court that the original record of FIR No 402 sought by the court had been recovered from the FIA record and submitted to the court. The FIR was registered at the Lahore’s Ichhra police station on Nov 11, 1974, under Sections 302 and 307 of the Pakistan Penal Code.
The reason for seeking the missing records was to know why the case against Mr Bhutto was revived in 1977 when the same was consigned to record (closed) in 1975 after a report of the Justice (retd) Shafiur Rehman Commission on the conspiracy to murder charges against Mr Bhutto surfaced.
The case was reopened in 1977 when it was tagged with another case involving the now disbanded Federal Security Force (FSF) in a bomb blast attempt to assassinate Air Martial (retd) Asghar Khan at the Lahore railway station.
The chief justice went through the documents, including the commission’s report, briefly and observed that the commission which investigated the allegation from all angles could find nothing against Mr Bhutto. Perhaps the entire episode was revived after the July 5, 1977, martial law, the chief justice observed. But he made it clear that the court would not be sharing the entire contents of the case with anybody. Dr Babar Awan, who represents the president in the reference, accused the then Lahore High Court bench, headed by Acting Chief Justice Maulvi Mushtaq Hussain, of rehearsing the murder trial against Mr Bhutto.
He informed the court that then FSF director general Masood Mehmood was made an approver in the controversial conspiracy-to-murder conviction of Mr Bhutto after he had been arraigned in a contempt of court case on an application of Chaudhry Muhammad Irshad.
Masood Mehmood was made to appear before the then LHC bench six days after he had recorded his 100-page confessional statement involving Mr Bhutto in the conspiracy to murder case before the then chief martial law administrator.
Mr Mehmood had become an approver after the confessional statement, Dr Awan said, adding that the contempt case was without any specific allegation but nobody, not even the prosecutors and the bench, cared to ask about the nature of charges against Mr Mehmood to hold him guilty of contempt of the LHC.
The case was then adjourned for Sept 14, but instead of bringing Mr Mehmood before the high court, he was taken to a local magistrate in Lahore where he named Mr Bhutto as the main conspirator behind the murder of Nawab Muhammad Ahmad Khan, although in his first statement recorded by an Islamabad magistrate he had not nominated Mr Bhutto in the case.
Senior counsel Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, who is appearing as amicus curaie (friend of the court), said the time had come to pay back the debt so that the country could move towards integration.
He sought the court’s permission to move an application for summoning certain records from different courts, including challenges against the then LHC for trying Mr Bhutto in the conspiracy to murder case.
The court allowed him to submit the application, but held that any decision in this regard would be made after consulting other members of the bench.
The chief justice said that the president was not a party in the reference, but enjoyed a unique locus standi for seeking an opinion from the court, adding: “We are sitting here to do justice to an individual who had an international stature for being the first chairman of the OIC, former president, prime minister, foreign minister notwithstanding the fact that he was also the chairman of a political party.”
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