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ISLAMABAD A member of the five-judge Supreme Court bench hearing corruption charges against former attorney general Sardar Latif Khosa stunned everybody in the courtroom on Friday by reading out an anonymous letter suggesting similar proceedings against himself and another member of the bench.
Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja said that the writer of the letter had accused him and the other judge of influencing the chief justice to decide a case in favour of a notorious figure of land mafia.
'We should not be afraid of mala fide intentions of people,' he said without disclosing the name of the other judge.
The bench comprising Justice Khalilur Rehman Ramday, Justice Nasirul Mulk, Justice Raja Fayyaz Ahmed, Justice Jawwad and Justice Ghulam Rabbani had taken up a corruption case against Sardar Khosa on a complaint by a NAB convict, Maghfoor Shah, who is a former general manager of the National Highway Authority (NHA).
The complainant had accused Mr Khosa of taking Rs3 million as bribe from him for getting the decision in his favour at the time Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar was heading the Supreme Court. However, he lost the case.
On Thursday, Sardar Khosa had filed an application before the court requesting Justice Ramday not to sit on the bench because he had never felt comfortable with the judge and the cases of his clients hardly ever succeeded before him.
At the outset of the proceedings, Justice Ramday asked Sardar Khosa why he had not said earlier that he was not comfortable with him when he (the former attorney general) had been appearing before him for the past 11 years.
'I moved the application because I have been accused of corruption,' Sardar Khosa said.
Justice Ramday reminded Sardar Khosa of a resolution adopted in the past by a bar association in his (former AG's) presence in which a demand had been made for his (judge's) medical check-up.
He said he had granted relief to several PPP leaders during his career and when two corruption references against President Asif Ali Zardari were fixed before him, he had excused from sitting on the bench because his brother (late Chaudhry Farooq) was the attorney general at the time.
The judge recalled that no PML-N leader had got reprieve from him in a case.
'In my career spanning over 21 years no one has ever pointed a finger against me for being partial,' Justice Ramday said.
'But you often mock us,' Sardar Khosa said.
Justice Jawwad said he wanted to say something and then started reading out the letter he had received in which he and another judge, who usually sits on the bench headed by the chief justice, had been accused of having attended a dinner hosted by an infamous land mafia figure (whose name was not mentioned) where an agreement was allegedly reached to decide a pending case in favour of the mafia.
The same mafia often got cases decided in its favour from high courts, the letter alleged.
'Earlier, high courts were prone to such a menace, but now even the Supreme Court has not been spared,' the judge quoted the writer of the letter as saying.
'We should decide the instant matter without being emotional, because it is a matter of integrity of the institutions, Justice Jawwad said, adding that a tendency had emerged to malign both the bench and the bar.
Justice Ramday adjourned the matter for three weeks to let Sardar Khosa ponder over his request to the judge to recuse him from the bench.
