KARACHI: The administrative judge of the antiterrorism courts remanded on Tuesday a provincial lawmaker of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement in prison custody in a case related to the alleged distribution of CDs of anti-state speeches.

After the end of his physical remand, police reproduced MPA Shiraz Waheed before the court and the administrative judge sent him to prison on judicial remand and asked the police to file an investigation report.

According to the FIR, the MPA along with his 15 absconding accomplices was allegedly distributing CDs, which contained speeches and statements to wage war or attempt or abet to wage war against the country, among the people in Ahsanabad.

Police claimed that they found 32 such CDs in the custody of the MPA at the time of his arrest on Aug 25.

The case was registered under Sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 121 (waging or attempting to wage war or abetting waging of war against Pakistan), 123-A, 124-A and 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code read with Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 at the SITE Superhighway Industrial Area police station.

Identification parades

Some witnesses picked out on Tuesday 26 suspects during identification parades before a judicial magistrate in two cases pertaining to sedition, anti-state offences and attack on media houses.

Three Muttahida Qaumi Movement leaders with around 40 workers, including three women, are in police custody on physical remand pertaining to Aug 22 incidents following a highly-provocative speech of their London-based chief.

Police produced the detained activists before a judicial magistrate (south) for identification parades while three witnesses turned up to identify them.

The judicial sources said that the witnesses rightly picked out 26 suspects among the dummies and assigned their roles in the commissioning of the alleged offences.

They were booked in two cases registered at the Artillery Madian police station under multiple charges, including sedition and offences against the state.

Suspect indicted in KESC chief murder case

An antiterrorism court indicted on Tuesday a suspect in a 1997 triple murder case.

Mohammed Minhaj Qazi, alias Asad, along with his accomplices has been booked in the murder case of the then managing director of the Karachi Electric Supply Company Malik Shahid Hamid, his driver, and a guard in the Defence Housing Authority in 1997.

The ATC-V judge, Mohammed Javed Alam, read out the charges.

However, the accused pleaded not guilty and opted to contest the case. The court summoned the prosecution witnesses with the direction to record their evidence on Sept 26.

Police in a supplementary investigation report chargesheeted Qazi as one of the alleged shooters, adding that he and Saulat Mirza along with their two other accomplices had fired at the car of the MD of the KESC with Kalashnikov assault rifles.

They also named MQM chief Altaf Hussain, the party convener Nadeem Nusrat, a London-based leader Sohail Zaidi and two workers, Rashid Akhtar and Athar Hussain as absconders in the charge sheet and on a previous hearing, the court declared them proclaimed offenders.

An ATC had already sentenced MQM worker Saulat Ali Khan, better known as Saulat Mirza, to death in 1999 in this case and he was executed in the Machh jail in Balochistan on May 12, 2015.

Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2016

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