KARACHI, Aug 20: The man who spent 17 year behind bars merely because his case file had disappeared in police custody was acquitted by the additional district and sessions judge-III, South, Sultan Mohammad Awan, on Monday after his plight was highlighted in the press.
Dr Ghulam Mustafa Ismail Qazi is a former ad-hoc judge of the Lahore High Court and also husband of an army captain, Dr Mubarika, who was killed in Siachin some 18 years ago.
Their only son, Mubarak, who was just one and a half years old when he was arrested, had been left with no proper care and went missing after the death of his mother and incarceration of his father. The father desperately tried to locate the toddler from the jail but nobody helped.
When the judge pronounced his acquittal order, Mr Qazi was in tears. The judge deplored police inefficiency and apathy.
Mr Qazi, a PhD in Arabic, blames his suffering on a powerful group, whose ire he earned during his government service in various capacities. He also alleges that the group wanted to grab his land. He is facing similar cases in four different courts of Mutan and Rawalpindi, which he wants to be heard in a single court, preferably in Islamabad.
Since 1993, he had been shuttling between the District Jail Malir and the City Courts only to hear of a new date without his case proceeding any further.
Defence counsel Dilip Kumar Ladhani and Muhammad Murad Khaskheli had already submitted an application under 265-K of the Criminal Procedure Code, stating that the case had been pending since 1993 and the prosecution had failed to produce further witnesses against the accused since then.The defence counsel also referred to the statement of a private prosecution witness, Syed Mohammad Suhail, and claimed he was a passer-by and had just seen the accused in police custody after his arrest.
In reply to a question, the lawyer said if the accused had pleaded guilty, he would have been sentenced to a maximum of 14 years, but as an under-trial prisoner he had spent about 17 years in jail thanks to the police.
Dr Qazi also produced in the court a copy of a news report that appeared in Dawn’s August 15 issue, highlighting his sad story and police indifference to his ordeal.
The judge, after hearing the final arguments in the presence of the state counsel, expressed his displeasure over the misplacement of the case file. He passed an order for his acquittal.
Mr Qazi was charged with his involvement in a forged documents case. A case (FIR 119/92) against him was registered by the CIA police at the Clifton police station in 1992 under Sections 420, 468,170,471,472,473, and 474 of the PPC.
The case was lodged by a former deputy secretary to the chief minister of Sindh, Ata Mohammad Memon, alleging that he had used forged documents and signatures of the then chief minister.
During his interview with Dawn on Aug 15, Mr Qazi had also named two other persons, Chuttan and Mukhtiar, who were also accused in the same case. “Chuttan was honourably acquitted by the additional district and sessions judge-III, South, Syed Inaam-ur-Rehman, on Nov 29, 1997, while Mukhtiar was shown by police as dead, but he is alive,” he said.
He also said his father, Akhund Mohammad Ismail Qazi, had served as a vice-chancellor of the Islamia University of Bhawalpur. He was inducted into the foreign affairs ministry during the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto government and was also appointed ambassador to Kabul, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arab.
In his appeal to Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry he claimed that all the cases against him were baseless and his opponents wanted him to waste life in visiting various cities and courts.