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ISLAMABAD, Aug 2: The government has ordered the CDA to stop development work in Sector D-12 till the completion of judicial inquiry into Monday’s incident in which three persons were killed and hundreds of others injured.
The order has been issued on the recommendation of an inquiry commission, comprising District and Sessions Judge Sheikh Ahmed Farooq. The judge visited the Sri Saral village on Friday.
It was announced on behalf of the commission that all those who wanted to get their eyewitness accounts recorded should get their names registered on Saturday and Monday at the judge’s chamber. Their statements would be recorded from August 5 to 8.
The judge arrived at the site in the company of Frontier Constabulary. He did not take along police personnel who, the court staff noted, were “a party to the dispute”.
Villagers told him that the Islamabad administration and the CDA had issued them no prior notice of the operation for demolition of their homes.
The commission did not record any statements on the occasion but patiently heard the villagers and assured them that “everything would be done in accordance with the principles of justice”.
Villagers insisted that very few residents of the village had been compensated or allotted alternative land for the proposed displacement. Therefore, they added, the CDA and the police were not justified in carrying out the operation.
They complained that police personnel tortured the villagers including women and also breached the sanctity of their homes in doing so.
The commission assured them that all those responsible for the unfortunate incident would face stern legal action.
The tension in the locality was eased after the visit of the commission, as the administration had withdrawn police personnel deployed around the place.
OUR STAFF REPORTER ADDS: The Frontier Constabulary (FC) escorted District and Sessions Judge Shaikh Ahmad Farooq to Sri Saral village.
The judge had earlier refused to take along Islamabad police personnel and asked the interior ministry to provide him guards from some agency other than the Islamabad police, an official source said.
A deputy director of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) also accompanied the judge who arrived in Sri Saral at about 12:45pm.
The inquiry officer inspected the bullet-riddled walls and locked houses where poor families lived before their evacuation on Monday.
A large number of villagers gathered around the district and sessions judge to give the details of losses they had suffered at the hands of CDA and police.
Most of the victims told the judge that they could identify the policemen who had opened fire that claimed the life of Haq Nawaz who was rearing cattle at that time.
The villagers also complained that the police were not allowing them to see their hospitalized relatives. The judge told them that he would go to the hospital on Saturday and direct the police not to stop the people from meeting their relatives.
The FIA deputy director also collected some blood samples from the site of clash and saw the marks of torture on people’s bodies.
