KARACHI: A prosecutor on Monday moved an antiterrorism court asking it to summon Muttahida Qaumi Movement lawmaker Rauf Siddiqui as an accused in the Baldia factory fire case.

In the application, the special public prosecutor, Sajid Mahboob Shaikh, said police had shown Mr Siddiqui in column two of a supplementary charge-sheet with blue ink stating that no sufficient evidence had been found against him.

In a previous charge-sheet, police had placed all the accused in column two on identical ground but the trial court summoned all the accused persons in September 2016, he recalled.

The prosecutor said that the name of MQM lawmaker was initially disclosed by accused, Rizwan Qureshi, before a joint investigation team (JIT) and then the former sector in charge of the MQM, Abdul Rehman alias Bhola, had named him during his confessional statement before a judicial magistrate.

He argued that there was sufficient evidence available against Mr Siddiqui to connect him with the commission of the crime and asked the court to summon him as an accused to face the trial.

The ATC-VII judge, who is hearing the case inside the central prison, adjourned the hearing till Oct 14 for arguments on the application.

According to the supplementary charge-sheet, Abdul Rehman alias Bhola, who was brought back after his arrest in Bangkok through Interpol in December last year, disclosed during interrogation that he with Zubair alias Charya, and others had set fire to the factory on the instruction of the then chief of the MQM organising committee Hammad Siddiqui as the factory owners had refused to pay the demanded protection money and ‘partnership’.

The suspect also alleged that after the incident Rauf Siddiqui allegedly got a case registered against the owners of the industrial unit and then the suspect said that he came to know that Rauf and Hammad received Rs40 million to Rs50 million from the owners to tone down the case against them.

However, the supplementary report stated that sufficient evidence was not found against the MQM MPA during investigation. It added that he joined the investigation and denied all the allegations.

Prosecutors without salaries

The provincial authorities had appointed eight lawyers as special public prosecutors to plead the cases in which the Rangers were complainant, but their salaries had not been released for the past three months.

The Sindh government had appointed Sajid Mahmood Shaikh as senior special public prosecutor and seven others as prosecutors in the cases registered on the complaint of the paramilitary force.

Mr Shaikh told Dawn that they had been pleading around 500 cases, including the Baldia factory fire case and those related to a pre-dawn raid at MQM headquarters in 2015. Overall his team was supervising the prosecution of around 7,000 cases, he added.

However, he said only eight prosecutors were working against the sanctioned strengthen of 11 at present and they had not been paid for the past three months.

Apart from his team, Mr Shaikh maintained that other special public prosecutors had been getting salaries on time. Also a female special prosecutor, who stepped down during the pre-trial stage of the Baldia factory fire case when the case took a dramatic turn in 2015, was paid but the salaries of the eight lawyers had not been released for the past three months.

FIA allowed to arrest KDA chief in another case

A local court on Monday allowed the Federal Investigation Agency to take the custody of the Karachi Development Authority (KDA) director general in order to arrest him in a new case.

Published in Dawn, September 26th, 2017