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LAHORE, Sept 1: The Lahore High Court on Wednesday issued a notice to the Shadbagh police to appear on Friday with the record of arrest of two brothers on Aug 19 as Al-Qaeda suspects.
The notice was issued on a petition by Ghulam Nabi, father of Ghulam Dastagir and Nadeem Ejaz, who were taken into custody by the police upon a clue given by certain foreign nationals arrested earlier in a drive against terrorism.
The petitioner submitted that his sons were government employees and practising Muslims. They offered prayers in a Shadbagh mosque regularly where they might have met certain suspects, but they themselves had no links with any terrorist organization.
CRIMINAL CASE: The High Court ordered registration of a criminal case against 18 officials of the Safdarabad police who broke into the house of a citizen without a legal cause and subjected the inmates to brutal torture.
Justice Mohammad Sayeed Akhtar issued the order in the process of a writ petition through which Tauqeer Ahmad had challenged the police highhandedness and violation of the sanctity of his home at Safdarabad.
The petitioner submitted that 18 policemen raided his house a week ago on the pretext that they had a clue that a proclaimed offender, Niamat Ali, who happened to be his distant relative, was hiding there.
According to the petitioner, the police subjected his wife to torture to a degree that she lost her capacity to bear children. The court observed that police, custodian of the sanctity of homes and personal freedom of citizens, were themselves violating citizens' fundamental rights which was a matter of grave concern.
FREED: The LHC freed a detainee, Mohammad Aslam, who had been kept in illegal confinement by a landlord of Mandi Bahauddin, Inayat Ali, for six months. Aslam was recovered and produced in the court by a bailiff in the process of a habeas corpus petition submitted by Aslam's wife Munira Bibi.
The court took serious exception to unlawful custody in a private jail, and observed that the state was under a constitutional obligation to protect the life and property of all citizens and curbs on personal freedom constituted a heinous crime.
It also observed that the state was under a national duty to prevent influential people from taking law in their own hands; confinement of a person in a private jail was a barbaric act which should be condemned in the strongest words.
The petitioner contended that the landlord had imprisoned her husband since April on the pretext of a monetary dispute. The landlord submitted to the court that Aslam owed him about Rs70,000 which he was neither returning nor working for him. The court censured him that the dispute could have been settled by legal means, and the unlawful detention was by no means justified.
