PESHAWAR: Woman implicated in false case still in jail
Bureau Report
PESHAWAR, Dec 16: Hopes of a Nigerian woman, arrested on charge of drug pushing, that she would celebrate Eid with her daughter, were shattered as her case could not be fixed before the concerned judge of the high court.
Fatima Mohammad, who is eight-month pregnant, has been in prison for about four months.
In one of the two cases against her the concerned court in Haripur district had declared that she was falsely implicated in the case by the Anti-Narcotics Force. The court also fined the ANF of Rs25,000 for vexatious allegations and directed that the amount should be paid to the woman.
Now, the only charge against her was an untraced case against which her application for quashment has been pending before the high court. The ANF was reportedly searching for a woman named Ms Safaralo alias Fatima of Sierra Leone who was charged in different cases and could not be traced out. When the ANF found a woman by the name of Fatima they arrested her despite the fact that neither the country of origin of the two ladies was the same nor their passport numbers were identical.
Her petition for quashment was taken up for hearing by Justice Khalida Rachied of the Peshawar High Court on different occasions, but due to one reason or the other her case could not be decided. Few days back the bench asked her counsel to produce school documents of the applicant’s daughter studying in Islamabad. When the said documents were produced the bench observed that the case was yet not admitted to full hearing and therefore notice should be issued to the ANF.
Two days back the case was fixed again before Justice Qaim Jan. However, the bench observed that it was a part-heard case and should be fixed before the bench of Justice Khalida Rachied. The court fixed Jan 14, 2002 for the next hearing.
On Sept 7, 2001, the court in Haripur acquitted the woman after preliminary hearing and also took to task the ANF for framing the lady in false case. The court observed that the passport number of the accused Safaralo was 222230 whereas that of Ms Fatima was 022228.
