12 November 2004	Friday	28 Ramazan 1425

LAHORE, Nov 11: A division bench of the Lahore High Court on Thursday allowed bail before arrest of DIG Malik Muhammad Iqbal and 16 others and directed them to join the trial of the Sialkot jail firing case at the Anti-Terrorism Court of Gujranwala.

The court directed them to ensure their appearance on each day of proceedings.

The bench, comprising Justice Sheikh Abdur Rashid and Justice Muhammad Bilal Khan, ordered the grant of interim bail to the accused on bonds valuing Rs100,000 each.

Petitions for pre-arrest bails were filed by Malik Iqbal, who is now serving as the DIG Highways Patrolling (Lahore), Gujrat DPO Raja Munawar Husain, former Sialkot DPO Amjad Javed Saleemi, two doctors of the Allama Iqbal Memorial Hospital, Muhammad Firdaus and Sajid Husain, and 12 Elite Force officials, including Shabbir Anwar, Mahmood Butt and Ghulam Sarwar. All of them were present in court.

The petitioners, through different counsel, pleaded that they were not charged in the beginning and their names not mentioned in the original FIR. They said their names were added to the FIR through supplementary statements and they were implicated in the case by the complainant in connivance with the Sialkot police.

They also cited a number of inquiry reports to depose that the firing incident could at best be called a negligence in execution of a rescue operation on July 25 last year and it could in no manner be described as a calculated attempt to murder.

The petitioners submitted that the police force reached the jail when five hardened criminals, including Shahbaz Butt, Ashfaq Ahmad alias Ishaq, Muhammad Rafiq alias Kana and Muhammad Muneer alias Muneeri, had taken the judges hostages and started killing them one by one. They had already killed three of them, the petitioners added.

Under the circumstances, they submitted the rescue operation became extremely difficult and the firing on criminals was left as the only option. They submitted that the Elite Force opened fire as the last resort and any accident during the performance of the official duty could not be contemplated as a crime under any legal provisions.

The men in the dock were charged with the murder of four civil judges Sagheer Anwar, Shahid Munir Ranjha, Asif Mumtaz Cheema and Syed Shehryar Bokhari, and five inmates of the Sialkot jail in an indiscriminate fire to rescue 12 judicial officers on July 25 last year.Opposing the bails, advocates Syed Ghulam Abbas Bokhari, Chaudhry Tahir Farooq Cheema, Muhammad Imtiaz Bajwa and a team of the Lahore High Court Bar Association office-bearers, including president Ahmad Awais and secretary Azam Nazir Tarar, submitted that the petitioners were fugitive from law and entitled to any legal concession only after they first surrendered themselves before the court. They also questioned the competence of Justice Sheikh Abdur Rashid to hear the petitions on the ground that he, as the LHC registrar, had supervised the judicial inquiry and the defence wanted him to appear in court as a witness.

The lawyers also opposed the hearing of the bail by the bench which, they submitted, should be the same which took up the case earlier.

The court, however, dismissed the defence objection and held that it could advance arguments only after notices were served.

The district and sessions judge and 12 other judicial officers were on a routine inspection of the jail when they were taken hostages by the five inmates, who were later gunned down.

The LHC last month remanded back to the ATC the appeal against the accused's pre-arrest with the instructions that the appeal for the cancellation of the bails should be decided on merit. The ATC cancelled the bail of all the 15 accused police officials and two doctors and soon after they fled.

Through another move, the LHC has directed the trial ATC to decide the case in one month by way of holding day-to-day hearing.

Advocates Sayyed Mazhar Ali Akbar Naqvi, Malik Amjad Pervez and others defended the petitioners.