PESHAWAR, Oct 22: The Peshawar High Court on Tuesday expressed displeasure with the provincial government officials, including secretaries, for delaying implementation of its orders and asked the chief minister to take action against such officials.

During hearing into separate cases, a bench comprising Chief Justice Dost Mohammad Khan and Justice Asadullah Khan Chamkani ordered the government to conduct an inquiry about the officials wilfully delaying implementation of the court orders, especially those on the filing of written comments in different petitions.

It observed that if such officials were in the provincial service, then the provincial government should take action against them and if they belonged to the federal government, then they should be posted out of the province.

The bench also ordered production of a report about the action taken against such officials.

However, no deadline was set for the purpose.

The bench observed that in several cases, it had noted that despite passage of many months the relevant departments had not filed comments in reply to different writ petitions due to which the precious time of the court was wasted.

On Tuesday, at least in seven cases comments were not filed despite passage of several months.

The bench accepted a writ petition filed by woman, Parveen Bibi, requesting the bench to order the provincial government to pay her compensation for the death of one of her sons at a police post when some miscreants had attacked it with grenades on July 3, 2011.

The bench observed that despite passage of over a year, the provincial home department had not filed comments in the case and the unfortunate petitioner had been regularly been visiting court in the hope of getting justice.

Nasrun Minallah, lawyer for the petitioner, said officials of Bana Mari police station had arrested two sons of his client, Shahbaz Masih and Nawaz Masih, in a theft case.

He, however, said police had kept the two in illegal detention for three days and didn’t produce them before any magistrate.

The lawyer said when miscreants attacked a police post at Gulabad, one of the brothers, Shahbaz Masih, was killed, whereas the other suffered injuries.

He added that FIR of the occurrence was also registered under Section 7 of the Anti- Terrorism Act but the government had so far not paid compensation to the legal heirs of the two.

The bench observed that safeguarding life and property of an individual was responsibility of the state, especially when the deceased was killed in custody of police, the government was bound to pay compensation.

The bench regretted that the government officials had not been taking interests in the cases pending before the courts.

It also warned that it would either send the relevant secretary to prison or make him pay heavy fine from own pocket.