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| India-Pakistan |
| Arrest of TNSM chief's sons |
| 2009-08-20 |
| [The News (Pak) Top Stories] The Peshawar High Court (PHC) Tuesday directed the district coordination officer (DCO) of Peshawar to submit record of the arrest of three sons of the banned Tanzim Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM) chief Maulana Sufi Mohammad. Presiding over a single bench of the PHC, Justice Dost Muhammad Khan directed the DCO Peshawar to submit the record before the next hearing fixed for August 20. The judge was taking up a petition filed by Sufi Muhammad's three sons -- Rizwanullah, Hayatullah and Ziaullah -- through Bakht Wahid, one of their close relatives. The petitioners stated that on July 22 the personnel of Paharipura Police Station took them into custody from their house in Sethi Town, Haji Camp Peshawar and put them in "illegal" confinement at different police station including CID Centre in Peshawar. They said it came to their knowledge that DCO Peshawar later charged them under Section 3(1) of the Maintenance of Public Order (MPO). The petitioners' counsel, Muhammad Atlas Khan, argued that his clients were law-abiding citizens and their father, Maulana Sufi Muhammad, was a religious personality and well-known for his views in the NWFP and the country. Rizwanullah, he said, had settled in Saudi Arabia for the last 13/14 years, while Hayatullah was a PTC teacher in a government-run school in Maidan in Dir Lower and Ziaullah was doing his post-graduation in Islamiyat from Malakand University. The counsel asserted that his clients never indulged in any political or criminal activity and this fact could be confirmed from record of all the police stations of the Frontier province. He said the DCO Peshawar arrested them under Section 3(1) of the MPO and handed them down one-month imprisonment. The petitioners prayed to the court to set aside the DCO order and release them from Central Prison, Peshawar. The NWFP home and tribal affairs secretary, DCO Peshawar, senior superintendent of police (operation) Peshawar and Paharipura Police Station in-charge were made respondents in the petition. Sufi Mohammad was initially arrested under 3 MPO like his three sons for 30 days and sent to the jail. Subsequently, a sedition case was filed against him in a police station in Mingora on the basis of a speech that he made at a public meeting at the Grassy Ground in the city on April 19, 2009 in which he declared the superior courts of the country un-Islamic and demanded enforcement of Shariah in Malakand division. His sons were not charged in the sedition case. |
| Posted by:Fred |