MNAs protest Javed’s arrest: No relief from Speaker
By Raja Asghar
ISLAMABAD, Oct 31: Members of the opposition protested inside and outside the National Assembly on Friday after failing to win a parliamentary relief for arrested ARD president Javed Hashmi.
Amid slogan-chanting in the assembly, Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain read out an intimation he said he had received from the government about Mr Hashmi’s arrest on Wednesday night on eight counts, including charges of sedition and abetting mutiny, but did not respond to an opposition demand to order the politician’s production in the lower house of the parliament.
Members of the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal started protesting immediately after the start of the assembly’s proceedings, shouting slogans against President Pervez Musharraf and the Legal Framework Order besides calling for Mr Hashmi’s release.
Initially, they assembled in front of the speaker’s rostrum, ignoring his reprimands and calls to go back to their desks. A few minutes later, they walked out of the house, still chanting slogans against the president and the LFO, staging a protest demonstration outside the parliament building.
Opposition delegations met the speaker on Thursday and just before the start of the assembly session on Friday morning, urging him to order for Mr Hashmi’s production in the house as allowed under the parliamentary rules of procedure but failed to win any promise from him, opposition sources said.
“The speaker said he is still considering the matter,” PPP’s secretary-general Raja Pervez Ashraf said after the opposition walkout.
Monday will also be the last day of a five-day-long remand that the government says was given by a judicial magistrate on Thursday allowing police to keep Mr Hashmi in custody for investigation.
Police had arrested Mr Hashmi from his flat in Islamabad’s parliamentary lodges on Wednesday night on allegations apparently emanating from a news conference he addressed on Oct 20 where he distributed photocopies of an unsigned letter that he said had been received from unknown army personnel.
The letter, described by government spokesmen as fake, had called for the appointment of a national inquiry commission to investigate the role of generals in the 1999 Kargil operation, the army coup of Oct 12 the same year and the start of the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan in Oct 2001.
Parliamentary sources said Mr Hashmi’s arrest could further heighten prevailing government-opposition tensions over the LFO.
Speaker Amir Hussain, reading from an official document, cited eight sections of the Pakistan Penal Code under which the police had registered a case against the ARD president who, he said, had been “presently lodged” at the nearby Sihala police station, southeast of Islamabad.
