Court drops cases against Malik

Published: May 8, 2011

Judge cites lack of evidence for the decision against interior minister.

RAWALPINDI: 

An accountability court here on Saturday dropped proceedings against Interior Minister Rehman Malik in two 13-year-old corruption references, accepting the National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) plea to withdraw the cases.

ATC-IV Judge Chaudhry Abdul Haq in his short order verbally announced that he agreed with the arguments presented by NAB prosecutors that there was no evidence to convict the accused.

The court discharged the interior minister and his alleged accomplice Sajjad Haider from cases initiated in 1997 when Rehman Malik was additional director-general of the Federal Investigation Agency.

In June last year, Additional Prosecutor-General Malik Jamil Awan defended the bureau’s decision to withdraw the references filed under Section 31-B of the NAB Ordinance of 1999. He had apologised for the filing of fake cases against the FIA officials.

Awan had said that the involvement of the interior minister and other FIA officials in a raid on the house of Hashim Raza Rizvi could not be proved. He said Malik was not heading the raiding team, which was following orders of the then interior minister, Naseerullah Babar.

He said that Malik, being the additional director-general of FIA, had to follow orders of the then interior minister to raid the house of the alleged human trafficker and narcotics smuggler.

About the allegation levelled by Hashim Raza’s brother Abbas Raza that the FIA team had looted 20 tolas of jewellery and Rs700,000, Awan said that the complainant had not objected to the recovery of a memo prepared at that time, and the case was registered three years later.

Referring to the second reference in which Malik was accused of receiving two cars worth Rs1.798 million from Toyota Central Motors in Karachi, the assistant prosecutor-general said the cars had not been taken as a commission.

The NAB lawyer produced an affidavit of the then director-general of FIA about Rehman Malik’s non-involvement and said that no FIA official was on the committee for purchasing the vehicles.