The Supreme Court (SC) told Punjab Advocate General Khawaja Haris Ahmed on Tuesday to get the first information report (FIR) and supplementary reports of the investigation of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s case from Ichra Police Station in Lahore and produce it before the court. The court also told the chief lawyer to inform it about the Punjab government’s response on whether the Shafiur Rehman report should be made public.
The court told Haris that if he had provided the supplementary reports of investigation, then there was no need for other things as whatever he had read from various records was sufficient. The chief justice noted that the court would examine the supplementary reports. Resuming his arguments, Dr Babar Awan, counsel for the government, stated that it had been proven that Bhutto’s death sentence was a judicial killing.
He said Benazir Bhutto had mentioned this in her book “Daughter of the East”. “We need to look at all the things deeply to answer the questions asked in the presidential reference,” Justice Jawwad S Khawaja said. Awan stated that Maulvi Mushtaq Ahmed, the acting chief justice of the Lahore High Court at the time, had said in reply to Bhutto’s application about the judges’ bias that the court had “taken your application and made it part of the record and it will be disposed of after the trial”.
The court asked Awan to display bias in the order, to which he replied that manipulation of the record was the worst kind of bias. He said the judges had said that in the interest of justice, the proceedings of the Bhutto case would be conducted in-camera and had passed an order in that regard on October 24, 1978. He said Bhutto’s counsel was even denied a copy of Bhutto’s statement that he gave in court.
The chief justice inquired if there was a conflict between Maulvi Mushtaq and Bhutto, to which Awan replied that Mushtaq was twice superseded during the tenure of Bhutto. Tariq Mehmood, one of the amicus curiae, quoting from Hamid Ali Khan’s book, said when Mushtaq was superseded he left the country and lived in Switzerland for two years. He came back when martial law was imposed on the country. He said Justice Aslam Riaz, who was junior to seven judges of the Lahore High Court, was made the chief justice, as he was a friend of Bhutto’s lawyer Yahya Bakhtiar.
