KARACHI: The Sindh High Court on Monday declared as illegal the preventive detention of a man acquitted in the PIDC car bombing case over eight months ago and expressed serious resentment over provincial authorities for issuing successive detention orders to keep him in prison without justified grounds.

A two-judge bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha observed that the Sindh government had not only violated the constitutional rights of petitioner Abdul Hameed Bugti based on the particular facts and circumstances of the case, but also defied different provisions of the Constitution by issuing preventive detention orders, which lacked legal justification.

While allowing the petition, the bench further said that the material placed before the competent authority to put the petitioner under preventive dentition was insufficient as the petitioner was not found to be an “enemy alien”.

SHC orders petitioner to furnish two sureties of Rs2.5m each to court nazir before his release from jail

“In conclusion we find that the petitioner being a Pakistani national living in Pakistan whilst Pakistan is not in a declared war does not fall within the definition of “enemy alien” as used in Article 10(9) of the Constitution and whose detention under Article 10(9) was without lawful authority and in violation of Constitution,” it ruled.

“Suffice it to say that such malafide conduct on the part of the government of Sindh is highly deprecated,” it deplored and observed that issuing continuous and successive preventive detention orders on unjustified grounds just to keep a person in jail despite acquittal only served to undermine the criminal justice system in the eyes of public.

The bench further observed that the petitioner was sentenced to death by the trial court for very serious offences, but after serving over 14 years in prison without remission he was acquitted by the appellate forum (SHC) of all charges and the state has filed an appeal against acquittal which was pending before the Supreme Court for determination.

The provincial government has violated Articles 4, 9, 10(A), 15 and 25 of the Constitution by issuing repeated preventive detention orders which lacked legal justification, it added.

The bench in its judgement further ruled that the first two detention orders were no longer in field having ceased to have effect on their expiry and the third preventive detention order was struck down for being unlawful, but a notification to put the petitioner on the fourth schedule under the Anti-Terrorism Act was upheld to enable the state to monitor the activities of the petitioner after his release from prison.

Thereafter, it directed the petitioner to provide two sureties of Rs2.5 million each and a personal bond in like amount to the satisfaction of the nazir of the SHC before his release from jail to ensure that he would comply with the notification placing him on the fourth schedule and also extend full cooperation including providing his residential address, phone number to the home secretary.

However, the bench restrained both the federal and provincial governments as well as law enforcement agencies from issuing any further preventive detention order against the petitioner without its permission.

The SHC was moved to challenge three separate preventive detention orders issued by the provincial authorities against Abdul Hameed Bugti after his acquittal in April.

An antiterrorism court had sentenced two brothers, Mangla Khan and Aziz Khan, to death in May 2007 for masterminding and carrying out a bomb blast outside the PIDC building in November 2005 that had left four people dead and 21 others wounded. Bugti was also sentenced to death by the ATC in June 2014 in the same case.

The appellants through their lawyers challenged the trial court judgements before the SHC and on April 2 a two-judge bench of SHC upheld the capital punishment of both the brothers, but acquitted Bugti for lack of evidence.

Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2020