LAHORE: After a day of in-camera briefing to the House on the Sahiwal incident, the opposition in the Punjab Assembly raised some pertinent questions regarding both the incident and the briefing; it also reiterated its demand for a judicial commission to probe into the incident.

Deputy Speaker Dost Muhammad Mazari saved Law Minister Raja Basharat from answering embarrassing questions by prematurely proroguing the session. The minister had started the debate by saying that he would answer the opposition’s questions in his concluding remarks, which he never delivered, courtesy the chair.

PML-N’s Samiullah Khan said that since the government had conceded in Thursday’s briefing that it was an intelligence-based operation then the House has a right to ask for the full scope and quality of the intelligence: was the lead poor and if it did not provide a basis for a precise operation or police acted in haste and botched up everything, as the Punjab government was portraying.

Session prematurely prorogued before law minister could answer

The riddle must be solved and the culprits punished in order to avoid future mishaps, he told the House and said: “Only a high-powered judicial commission, not a low-level joint investigation team, can clarify this essential point.”

His fellow party member, Raheela Naeem, took off from where Mr Khan left: “The Punjab government’s afterthought of painting one of the victims as a terrorist does not jell and has become embarrassing: the government claims Zeeshan was a leader of the militant Islamic State group, but the Foreign Office is denying the very presence of the group in the country to avoid international reaction. [The government] should simply accept that it was a wrong operation, based on half-baked information and all four victims were murdered in cold blood.”

PPP’s Hassan Murtaza asked the law minister if terrorists sold and purchased vehicles through transfer letters, especially when they were planning to die. He asked that if Zeeshan was under surveillance for the last one year, why was he neither isolated nor nabbed all these months? When his vehicle hit the divider, what stopped police from arresting him alive and getting further leads to bust his entire ring?

“The PTI has been protesting drone attacks in tribal areas and was out on the streets to stop them, terming them extra-judicial killings. How can it justify, even support, the same kind of killing on the roads?”

Every lawmaker was expecting an official version on these questions from the law minister, as he had promised and was bound by the House tradition to conclude the debate. However, surprisingly, the chair abruptly prorogued the House and ended the debate, which the Treasury had been promising to hold for the last three days.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2019