KARACHI: A thief broke into the malkhana on the heavily guarded premises of the City Courts late on Tuesday night and decamped with case properties containing cash, jewellery and other valuables, said police on Wednesday.

Police said that when the staff of malkhana (storehouse of case property) opened the facility early on Wednesday morning, they found many articles scattered all over the place and some of them missing. A wall was partly broken down.

The case properties of Aziz Bhatti, Saudabad and other police stations containing over Rs600,000, jewellery, mobile phone sets and other valuables had been stolen, said the police.

A case was registered against an unidentified suspect under Sections 380 (theft in a dwelling, house) and 457 (lurking house-trespass or house-breaking by night in order to commit offence punishable with imprisonment) of the Pakistan Penal Code on a complaint lodged by ASI Ghulam Mustafa, in-charge of the district east section of the malkhana at the City Courts police station.

The warehouse facility is located on the premises of the courts and almost adjacent to the City Courts police station.

Legal experts said the case of the prosecution would suffer irreparable damage if the case property had been robbed or gone missing before its production in court until it was justified through a proper FIR specifically mentioning missing articles.

Police officials said that investigators were questioning two policemen responsible for the security of the malkhana and the suspects would be nominated in the FIR if anything credible came up during the course of investigation.

“The investigators are also looking into the possibility of labourers or people other than the policemen having done the job. Construction work is also going on at the moment at the malkhana. It is also accessed by outsiders including labourers and other people. So along with the two policemen, we are also questioning the labourers,” said DIG-South Barrister Abdul Khaliq Sheikh.

A month ago, on Sept 2, three policemen were arrested for stealing four kilograms of hashish from the malkhana. The policemen were part of a team shifting case properties to containers near the storage facility when they stole the hashish but were soon caught by policemen at the main gate when they were about to leave the courts on a motorcycle.

Lawyers boycott courts

Lawyers observed boycott of courts on Wednesday in response to province-wide strike call given by the Sindh Bar Council on Tuesday night after a son of Advocate Nisar Durrani was kidnapped in Hyderabad.

The litigants suffered as hundreds of cases fixed at the city courts and district courts in Malir were not taken up for hearing and undertrial prisoners were sent back to prisons shortly after their arrival at the courts.

The legal work at special courts of the city including anti-terrorism courts, control of narcotic substances courts, accountability courts, anti-corruption courts and banking courts was also badly disturbed as lawyers did not turn up. However, the police produced newly-arrested suspects in courts for remand.

Published in Dawn, October 2nd, 2014