Court ruling illegal: Pak. prosecution

By Amit Baruah

ISLAMABAD, APRIL 20. The appeal filed by the prosecution against the grant of a ``lesser sentence'' to the former Prime Minister, Mr. Nawaz Sharif, appears to have ``privatised'' the offense of hijacking to enmity between Mr. Sharif and the Chief Executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Laying down the grounds for Mr. Sharif to have been given the death sentence, the prosecution appeal, filed in the Sindh High Court yesterday, stated: ``That the respondent (the ousted Prime Minister) is the arch culprit having a motive in the case he had used members of the Government machinery for personal vendetta and for satisfaction of an urge in him to avenge himself upon the person whom he considered his enemy (Gen. Musharraf).''

``For his own personal ends, he (Mr. Sharif) has turned those persons into criminals and thus crippled them, hence under these circumstances no punishment lesser than the normal punishment prescribed by law ought to have been awarded by the learned trial court which is death,'' the text of the appeal stated.

The appeal also claimed that the trial court ruling was ``perverse, completely illegal and on perusal of evidence no other conclusion could have been made except to award normal punishment which would have to be in consonance and in its true letter and spirit as mandated by Section 20 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997. It is submitted that the normal punishment prescribed under Section 402 is death''.

The prosecution also invoked Islam to argue that Mr. Sharif should have been handed down the death sentence and not jail for life. Islam, the appeal argued, did not believe in the creation of privileged classes as it believes in equality before law - ruler and governed alike. In a separate appeal filed against the acquittal of the six co-accused in the case, the prosecution said: ``The learned judge is not justified in arriving at a finding that the act of the principal accused was at the spur of the moment as the same is contrary to evidence and highly presumptive on the part of the learned trial court.''

It may be recalled that on April 6, the trial court had acquitted Mr. Shahbaz Sharif, former Punjab Chief Minister, Mr. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, former PIA chairman, Mr. Saifur Rehman, former anti-corruption boss, Rana Maqbool, former IGP Sindh, Mr. Ghaus Ali Shah, former adviser on Sindh, and Mr. Saeed Mehdi, senior official, in the hijacking case.

The prosecution argued that the acquittal of the six co-accused was an ``outcome of miscarriage of justice, in as much as the trial court has not entered deep into the merits of the case and has failed to discuss ocular as well as circumstantial evidence in juxtaposition as the same stands on judicial record''.

It also claimed that the trial judge had failed to take into account that a ``conspiracy was hatched in secrecy and it would be difficult to adduce direct evidence of the same''.

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