PESHAWAR: A Peshawar High Court bench on Tuesday sought details from the federal and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governments about their respective Shuhada packages for the victims of terrorism attacks.

Justice Qaiser Rasheed and Justice Mohammad Ayub Khan also directed additional advocate general Sikandar Shah to produce details of the compensation or Shuhada Package offered to the families of the students and staff members targeted during the Dec 2014 terrorist attack on the Army Public School, Peshawar.

The directions were issued by the court during the hearing into a petition seeking special Shuhada Package for the families of students killed by the APS attackers.

Ajun Khan and Tahir Khan, whose sons had died in the APS attack, jointly filed the petition requesting the court to direct the federal and KP government to give away special Shuhada Package to them and other APS attack-affected families equal to the one announced by the Balochistan government for the lawyers killed in the 2016 suicide blast in Quetta.

They said even the APS attack-affected families were not treated equally as the compensation package for the students’ families was different from the school employees’. The petitioners requested the court to order the government to offer equal compensation to all families affected the APS carnage, which left around 144 people, mostly students, dead.

Ayaz Khan, lawyer for the petitioners, said while the families of the APS students killed by terrorists were given compensation to the tune of Rs2 million each, the compensation given to legal heirs of the slain school employees was Rs9.5 million each. He said the government had discriminated against the students’ families, which was a violation to Article 25 of the Constitution.

The respondents in the petition are the KP government through its chief secretary, KP chief minister, provincial finance and establishment secretaries, provincial accountant general, and secretaries of the finance and establishment divisions.

Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2018