PESHAWAR, Sept 10: An anti-terrorism court on Friday sentenced 10 tenants of Charsadda district to five years' rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs6,000 each.

The tenants were accused by a landlord of Tanghi village, Haider AliKhan, of taking away a tractor and rioting.

The court presided over by Akhter Zareef Khan acquitted four of the accused. The complainant stated that he and his colleagues were tilling their land when the accused attacked them with sticks and took away the tractor.

Some of the convicts are elderly, two of them nearly 80 years old. Almost all of them were wearing worn-out clothes and they told newsmen that they were poor tenants and they had not committed any crime.

An old man, Shamsher, told Dawn that the landlords had been lodging fake cases against the tenants to get land vacated from them. He said the landlords tried to forcefully vacate the land and when the tenants resisted they and were charged in the FIR. Shamsher, Ameer Shah, Gujar Khan, Aslam, Abdul Mohammad, Noor Mohammad, Feroz, Umara Khan, Shahnawaz and Sher Mohammad were convicted.

They were charged in an FIR registered at the Tanghi police station onJuly 12, 2001. They were charged under sections 148 (rioting) and 395 (dacoity) of the Pakistan Penal Code read with Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997.

They were sentenced under the ATA to four years imprisonment and fined Rs5,000 each, in default of which they would have to undergo one year of imprisonment. They were sentenced under Section 148 to a year of rigorous imprisonment with a fine fo Rs 1,000, each.

The court acquitted Maqbool, Khalid, Shamsur Rehman and Azizur Rehman due to lack of evidence. Dozens of tenants were charged with terrorism in different FIRs in 2001 and 2002 by the landlords.

When the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal government came to power, it decided to delete Section 7 of the ATA from the FIRs but in February the Peshawar High Court declared the order illegal. A legal battle between the tenants and the landlords has been going on for decades in Charsadda.