KARACHI: Expressing serious resentment over the failure of the Joint Investigation Team for Missing Persons in locating the whereabouts of a man disappeared since 2016, the Sindh High Court on Thursday summoned the JIT head for Oct 27.

A two-judge bench headed by Justice Salahuddin Panhwar also directed the federal ministry of interior and regional director of the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) to depute their focal persons to attend the proceedings and assist the court on the next date.

Petitioner Najma Tahir had approached the SHC in 2016 stating that personnel of law enforcement agencies had raided her house in North Nazimabad in February 2015 and detained her husband Tahir Rehan.

She further argued that a petition was also filed in 2015 about the recovery of her husband, but he was shown arrested in a case and later the trial court issued his release order.

SHC commutes death sentence of a man into life term

However, the petitioner maintained that law enforcement agencies had again picked him in October 2016 at the gate of the Karachi central prison when he along with his lawyer came out of the jail.

Citing the provincial home secretary, director general of Rangers, intelligence agencies, provincial police officers, jail authorities and others as respondents, the petitioner pleaded for the recovery of her husband.

When the bench took the matter for hearing, a DSP submitted a progress report stating that despite the efforts of police and several sessions of the JIT the whereabouts of the missing person were not known as yet.

The deputy attorney general also filed a report of the interior ministry that maintained that on earlier court orders, the ministry had approached the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa home department and the authorities informed it that out of 306 missing persons mentioned in the list provided by the Sindh home department only three persons were found detained at their internment centres.

Such information had already been placed before the SHC in some other cases of identical nature, the report added.

The bench deplored that the matter had been pending since 2016, but the JIT had failed to locate the whereabouts of the missing person in question.

Death sentence commuted

Another SHC division bench on Thursday commuted the death sentence into life term of a man in a drug peddling case.

A sessions/model court in Malir had sentenced Muhammad Ansar to death in October last year after founding him guilty of carrying over two kilograms of heroin in Gadap in 2019.

The convict filed an appeal against the trial court order and after hearing both sides and examining the record and proceedings the bench headed by Justice K. K. Agha commuted the death sentence.

The bench in its order said that the appellant’s lawyer did not press the disposal of the appeal on merits and pleaded to modify the death sentence into life term by considering the mitigating circumstances of the case. The additional prosecutor general also raised no objection on such proposition, it added.

It further observed that the sentence needed to be modified as it came on record that the appellant was only 29, having five kids and got criminal record before and by accepting the guilt he had also shown his genuine remorse.

Published in Dawn, October 1st, 2021