MANSEHRA: Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl leader Mufti Kifayatullah obtained on Monday pre-arrest bail from a local court in a seminary student’s sexual assault case.

The police had booked Mr Kifayatullah for harbouring a cleric, Qari Shamsuddin, who had sexually assaulted a 10-year-old student of his seminary on Dec 24, last year.

“I was in Karachi when the Mansehra police booked me under the trumped up charges of harbouring a cleric, but I got a transit bail from the Lahore High Court’s Rawalpindi circuit bench on Feb 3,” Mr Kifayatullah told reporters after submitting his bail papers to the SHO Pulrah police station.

He said that he was also part of the system and accepted courts and their jurisdictions. He claimed that he was innocent and never harboured anyone in the sexual assault case.

The Mansehra police had raided possible hideouts of Mr Kifayatullah following registration of an FIR against him last week but he got a transit bail from Rawalpindi bench of the Lahore High Court.

The police had lodged the FIR against Kifayatullah under section 225/34 of the Pakistan Penal Code.

District police officer Sadiq Baloch had disclosed to mediapersons that Qari Shamsuddin during police interrogation had confessed that he wanted to surrender to the police, but the JUI-F leader, Mufti Kifayatullah, had barred him not to do so.

“Mufti Kifayatullah and Abdul Malik, another suspect also booked under the same section of the law, provided Qari Shamsuddin a safe haven to escape arrest,” Mr Baloch told mediapersons.

Last month, the JUI-F’s provincial executive council had suspended Kifayatullah from the office of the Mansehra district emir for harbouring the child’s assaulter and had formed a three-member committee to probe the matter.

Published in Dawn, February 11th, 2020