PESHAWAR, July 3: A two-member Peshawar High Court bench on Tuesday ordered immediate release of two brothers detained by the Swabi district coordination officer (DCO) under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance after declaring their detention illegal.

While ordering the release of Bazir Khan and Azmat Khan, Chief Justice Dost Mohammad Khan and Justice Khalid Mehmood said no substantive material was placed on record to substantiate the impugned order of the Swabi DCO.

Additional advocate general Fazlur Rehman Khan said the two, the petitioners, were wanted in different cases of car theft and change of chassis numbers of stolen vehicles and therefore, they were threat to peace of the society.

Mohammad Alamzeb Khan, lawyer for the two bothers, said the DCO had issued the impugned order on June 11 under Section 3 of MPO for the continued detention of Bazir and Azmat in prison for a month.

He added that no concrete material was available with the DCO on the basis of which the two could be detained under a law meant for preventive detention.

The bench observed that if at all criminal cases were registered against the petitioners, then in that case they were accused of substantive offences and preventive detention of petitioners on basis of same allegations would not be justified in law.It ruled that curtailing liberty of a citizen was a very drastic act prohibited by the Constitution unless the requirement of a particular law was fulfilled.

When the AAG pointed out that the DCO had issued the order on the recommendation of the district police officer (DPO), the chief justice regretted that under the law, a DPO was subordinate to the DCO but in that case, the DPO had been acting as superior to the DCO.

He added that the DCO had to use his independent mind in such cases instead of following the DPO directives without verification.

Also in the day, the same bench allowed criminal appeal of a convict and set aside the awarding of the capital punishment to him by the subordinate court in a case of killing of a taxi driver of Rawalpindi.

Appellant Adnan Bashir was arrested over the killing of cabbie Mohammad Nawaz in October 2006. He was later convicted by an additional sessions judge in Peshawar on March 12, 2009 before being sentenced to death.

A nephew of the cabbie, Asif Nawaz, had alleged that the accused contacted him at the Islamabad International Airport for hiring a luxurious car but since he had a small vehicle, he approached his uncle, Nawaz, for hiring his new car for the accused.

He said the next day, his uncle took the accused to Peshawar but later the body of the former was found in a local hotel’s room, while his taxi was missing.

The appellant’s lawyer, Malik Faisal, said neither the appellant had confessed to the killing nor had the weapon used for it recovered from him.

He added that no evidence of the killing was available, while the identification parade conducted by police was faulty for being conducted inside the prison without associating a magistrate.—Bureau Report