KARACHI, March 27: The two accused in the Frenchmen killing case could not be indicted on Thursday by the trial court as one of the defence counsel did not turn up.
A junior to M. R. Syed, counsel for Mohammed Asif Zaheer, appeared before the anti-terrorism court No 2, headed by Judge Feroz Mehmood Bhatti, and applied for adjournment.
He stated that the defence counsel was unable to appear in the court as he was engaged in the Sindh High Court.
The judge, who is conducting the trial inside the Central Prison’s main complex, fixed April 1 for the indictment of the two accused, who were allegedly trained in a camp of the Harkat Jihad-i-Islami in Afghanistan.
The two have been charged with the bomb blast near Sheraton Hotel that killed 13 people, including 10 Frenchmen, and injured 23 others.
The French engineers, who were helping Pakistan build its Agosta 90-B submarine, were killed when a explosives-laden vehicle rammed into their bus outside Sheraton Hotel. The explosion had also caused damage to shops on the ground floors of Pearl Continental and Sheraton hotels.
Mohammed Ashraf Mughul, the counsel appointed by the court for two absconding accused, Mohammed Sohail alias Akram and Adnan Qamar alias Noni alias Osama, special public prosecutors Maula Bux Bhatti and Mazhar Qayyum, and Gohar Iqbal, counsel for Rizwanullah, were present.
The police had shown five accused as absconders in the final charge-sheet. The judge, however, excluded three of them as the police mentioned their names without their fathers’ names.
BOMB BLAST CASE: The same court (ATC-2) put off the hearing of a bomb blast case against a worker of the Harkatul Mujahideen Al-Aalmi and an absconding accused after the cross-examination of a judicial magistrate by a defence counsel.
Mohammed Ashraf Mughul, the counsel appointed for absconding accused Asif Ramzi, cross-examined judicial magistrate Irum Jahangir, who had conducted the identification parade of the accused and had recorded his confessional statement.
Sabir Waseem, the Aalmi worker, has been charged with launching an anti-tank rocket (BM-107) that had pierced through the wall of Commerce College on Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Road on November 23, 2001.
While Amir Mansoob Qureshi, counsel for Waseem, was yet to cross-examine the JM, the judge adjourned the hearing to Saturday as the accused had to appear in the matriculation examination. Waseem is one of the 37 inmates of the Central Prison who are appearing in the exams from the jail.
According to the prosecution, accused Waseem, along with his absconding accomplice, Asif Ramzi, reached near the college to fire the rocket to target Americans staying on the second and third floors of Sheraton Hotel.
It was alleged that the two Aalmi men, carrying the rocket and its locally- made launcher in a kit bag, reached near the hotel on a motorcycle around 9:30pm. They positioned the launcher on the pushcart of a junk vendor. While accused Waseem was still trying to position the launcher to the hotel, the rocket exploded due to short-circuit and hit the wall of Commerce College. It landed in a classroom making an eight-inch hole in a wall.
According to the bomb disposal squad, the device was an anti-tank rocket, weighing 25 kilograms with 10-12 kgs of explosive material.
REMANDED: The judicial magistrate, East, Ms Zabiha Khattak, remanded Arshad Ali, a worker of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement, in police custody till March 31.
The Haqiqi worker, arrested on Wednesday with unlicensed weapons, is stated to be a driver of party chief Afaq Ahmed.