ISLAMABAD: Giving a statement to link a person with an offence and then backtracking from it has become customary as in 2016 out of the 5,681 criminal cases the accused won acquittal in 1,390 cases due to resiling of witnesses in the district of Rawalpindi alone.

This was revealed in the “Yearly District Report - Conduct of Prosecution” (available with Dawn), which was submitted to the prosecutor general and the secretary prosecution Punjab. It said out of the 4,588 criminal cases disposed of in the magisterial courts, the accused in 1,258 cases were acquitted “due to resiling of witnesses”.

At the sessions court, in the 1,093 cases, resiling of witnesses led to acquittal in 132 cases.

The accused persons were released in 66 cases due to out-of-court settlements and in 261 cases the courts acquitted the suspects due to “deficit evidence.”

Of 5,681 criminal cases in Rawalpindi district, accused were acquitted in 1,390 cases due to resiling of witnesses

A senior official of the prosecution department said since the number of prosecutors in various districts was less than the required strength, it was difficult for them to get effective results.

For example, he said, in Rawalpindi, 27 prosecutors were working to pursue criminal cases in 60 courts. The prosecution secretariat posted seven of them to other districts and departments and the district prosecution office was handling all the workload with 20 prosecutors only.

Legal experts, however, believed that in addition to the less number of prosecutors a lack of penal clauses also encouraged individuals to resile. In the Benazir murder case, the prosecution moved an application seeking action against SSP Yasin Farooq for backtracking from his earlier statement accusing DIG Saud Aziz of not providing an adequate security to Ms Bhutto.

According to a special prosecutor in the Benazir murder case, an application seeking action against Mr Farooq for changing stance against the DIG was still pending adjudication before the court.

Criminal lawyer Raja Inam Ameen Minhas said the prosecution can file an application against serving officials in case they resiled. But it is difficult to take action against a private person who gives a statement and disowns it later.

He said in past decades several politicians faced cases but when they came to power, they were acquitted mainly due to resiling of witnesses. Therefore, the political leadership never preferred amending the law to punish hostile witnesses.

Some witnesses in corruption references against former president Asif Ali Zardari, including an investigation officer in the ARY corruption reference, also resiled.

Besides witnesses, the prosecution also faced resiling by approvers.

According to senior lawyer Azhar Chaudhry, in the past approvers used to get punishment for resiling but since long no approver has been sentenced for changing their stance.

He cited a 1984 case in which an approver, Raj, resiled against three accused, including Hazoor Buksh. Eventually, the trial court awarded death sentence to Raj along with others.

Hazoor Buksh and others, including Raj, were charged with killing two children of a police officer. Later, Raj turned an approver but during the proceedings he disowned the confessional statement. But the court awarded all of them the death sentence.

In the Libya conspiracy case, the approvers - Sheikh Mansoor, Professor Zahoor and Nazir Baloch - faced life imprisonment after they resiled.

The case dated back to 1984 related to an attempted coup against the then military dictator, Gen Ziaul Haq.

According to Amjad Iqbal Qureshi, who was one of the defence counsel in the case, the military regime accused certain civilians and military men of hatching a conspiracy against Gen Zia at the behest of the then Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi. Mr Qureshi said the case was politically motivated as all the accused persons belonged to the PPP. When Benazir Bhutto came to power in 1988, all the accused, including the approvers who had resiled, were pardoned.

Published in Dawn, February 24th, 2017