COMMENT – The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) prosecutors may have another amusing tale to tell the Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) about why former president Pervez Musharraf, who is wanted in the Benazir Bhutto assassination case, could not be arrested and produced in court despite issuance of warrants for his arrest.
How “innocent” were the FIA officials who first carried Musharraf’s arrest warrant to his Islamabad farmhouse address and reported back to the court that the former president was not living there? Of course, it was not something that the court did not know as even the most ignorant man in the street had at least an inkling of where the wanted man was to be found.
And at last one good day it dawned upon the FIA that Musharraf was living in London. As if they did not know how to serve a warrant to a person living abroad, they approached the Foreign Office, which perhaps passed the buck to the Pakistani High Commission in London, from where the arrest order was purportedly sent to the British Home Office.
But all that FIA has done so far with regard to Musharraf’s arrest seems to be an exercise in futility after the British Prime Minister David Cameron this week stated that the UK had received no “proper” application requesting the former president’s extradition and presence in the ATC hearing of the Benazir assassination case.
One may simply hope that by now the FIA, or for that matter the Interior Ministry or the Pakistan government, must have done some homework on how to “request” the British government to handover the man wanted by the court, which will resume the hearing of the case today (Saturday).
