KARACHI: The administrative judge of antiterrorism courts on Tuesday threw out a police inquiry report about 65 cases of alleged shoot-outs calling it ambiguous and in contravention of the Feb 10 court order.

The administrative judge referred the cases back to the inspector general of police (IGP) with a direction to conduct an internal inquiry and submit its report within a month. The judge observed that though committees had been constituted they did not probe into the injuries sustained by suspects during the alleged encounters with police. Instead of investigating the matter, the committees suggested that trial courts should decide the same.

“This finding of the committees apparently seems to be a violation of directions given in the above order. Therefore, the IGP is once again directed to obtain a comprehensive report from the committees on the point as directed and submit the same in court within 30 days,” said the court order.

On Feb 10, the administrative judge had expressed grave concern over the alleged high-handedness of police for wounding over 80 suspects in 65 identical cases of alleged shoot-outs during the previous one-and-a-half months and directed the police chief to conduct an internal inquiry into the incidents as provided in Section 5(2) (i) of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 and sought a compliance report.

In its order, the court last month deplored that the suspects were mostly shot in the legs and it depicted classical high-handedness of law-enforcement agencies since many of the victims were found to be drug addicts. After conducting an internal inquiry into 65 cases, the police chief had placed its report before the administrative judge on March 13.

The report said that as per the committees’ recommendations the cases be decided by the trial courts and judicial enquiry be conducted where serious doubts had been raised by the affected parties. It added that the IGP constituted three committees, each headed by a deputy inspector general, to conduct an inquiry and the first committee looked into 42 cases of alleged encounters registered at different police stations of west zone; the second committee was tasked with a probe into 15 cases reported in the east zone, while the third committee investigated eight cases registered at police stations of south zone.

The IGP said in the report that a standard operating procedure (SOP) or a guideline be prepared for police personnel to ensure minimum use of lethal weapons and proportionate use of force as well as proper training to use modern techniques to arrest suspects. However, legal experts were of the opinion that instead of advancing such recommendation to court, the police chief should inform the court about the measures so far taken in this regard since they believed it was the IGP’s domain to prepare an SOP.

The legal experts believed that if there was no such order from the court, even then the provincial police chief was bound under the law to hold an internal inquiry into such cases since it was a mandatory provision in Section 5(2) of the ATA “Provided further that all cases of firing which have resulted in death or grievous injury shall be reviewed by an internal inquiry committee constituted by the head of the law-enforcement agency concerned”.

Published in Dawn, March 29th, 2017