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KARACHI, Aug 23: The Sindh High Court restrained the city district government on Monday from taking any coercive action in pursuance of a notice issued to a petitioner for payment of price differential of a Gulistan-i-Jauhar plot till Sept 2.
The petitioner, Salma Khatoon, submitted that while the original allottee might have been given the plot (C-12, Block 1A, Scheme 36) at concessional rates, she purchased it at the prevailing market price of Rs600,000 in November 1993.
Without being heard, she was asked to pay up Rs513,600 as price differential on the pain of cancellation of the lease under the Land (Cancellation of Allotments, Conversions and Exchanges) Ordinance, 2000.
The petitioner said the ordinance was not applicable to her as she bought the plot from its allottee at market price. There was no bar on its sale. The notice was issued without hearing her and affording her an opportunity to show cause.
The ordinance was being enforced selectively and she had been discriminated in violation of her legal and constitutional rights. There was no criterion for determining price differential.
The court asked the city government to submit its parawise comments within two weeks. In the meantime, no coercive action would be taken against the petitioner under the impugned notice. The petition would come up for hearing on Sept 2.
CONTEMPT PLEA: Contempt of court applications were filed in the Sindh High Court against jail authorities for giving false statements regarding shifting of two activists of the banned Harkatul Mujahideen Al-Aalmi, convicted in US consulate bombing case, to Hyderabad jail, adds PPI.
Rukhsana Farhat, mother of Sharib Farooqui; and Muhammad Raees Khan, father of Hafiz Zubair, moved the SHC for initiating contempt of court proceedings against the superintendent of Karachi central jail and his deputy as they allegedly misguided the court.
Hafiz Zubair and Sharib with Imran and Hanif were convicted by an anti-terrorism court on April 16, 2003 in the US consulate bomb blast case and their appeals are pending in the SHC.
It was alleged by the petitioners in their constitutional petitions that the jail authorities were maltreating their sons and had threatening them that they would be killed in a fake encounter during shifting from Karachi. The court was requested to stop the jail authorities from shifting their sons from Karachi to any other place.
The jail authorities had submitted before the SHC's division bench last month that there were no order regarding the shifting of the petitioners sons from Karachi to any other place. On which, the petitioners did not press their petitions and the court disposed it.
But the petitioners stated that when they went to meet their sons in the Central Jail of Karachi on the very day, they were informed by jail authorities that their sons had been shifted to the Hyderabad jail.
They visited the Hyderabad jail to see them but jail authorities there refused to allow them to see the prisoners without permission of the home department.
When the matter was taken up before the SHC's division bench comprising Justice Wahid Bux Brohi and Justice Rehmat Hussain Jaffery on Monday, the provincial law officer submitted that he had not received copies of the applications and requested for time to ascertain the facts. The court, granting time, fixed the matter for a date in office.
