ISLAMABAD: Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Mian Saqib Nisar will hear on May 7 review petitions against the 2012 Asghar Khan case judgment.
Former army chief General (r) Mirza Aslam Beg and former Inter-Services Intelligence DG Lt Gen (r) Asad Durrani had filed appeals against the apex court’s decision on the late air chief’s petition.
Sending notices to the affected parties, the apex court approved the petitions for hearing and will take up the matter on Monday.
A three-member bench headed by the chief justice will conduct the proceedings.
On October 19, 2012, the apex court had issued a 141-page verdict, ordering legal proceedings against General (r) Beg and Lt Gen (r) Durrani in a case filed 16 years ago by former air chief Air Marshal Asghar Khan.
Khan, who passed away in January this year, was represented in the Supreme Court by renowned lawyer Salman Akram Raja.
Khan had petitioned the Supreme Court in 1996 alleging that the two senior army officers and the then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan had doled out Rs140 million among several politicians ahead of the 1990 polls to ensure Benazir Bhutto’s defeat in the polls.
The Islamic Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI), consisting of nine parties including the Pakistan Muslim League, National Peoples Party and Jamaat-e-Islami, had won the 1990 elections, with Nawaz Sharif being elected prime minister. The alliance had been formed to oppose the Benazir Bhutto-led Pakistan People’s Party.
In 1996, Khan had written a letter to the then Supreme Court chief justice Nasim Hassan Shah naming Beg, Durrani and Younis Habib, the ex-Habib Bank Sindh chief and owner of Mehran Bank, about the unlawful disbursement of public money and its misuse for political purposes.
The 2012 apex court judgment, authored by the then-chief justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Chaudhry, had directed the Federal Investigation Agency to initiate a transparent investigation and subsequent trial if sufficient evidence is found against the former army officers.
That investigation is yet to conclude.
In May 2017, the PTI had said it would approach the Supreme Court over the FIA’s failure to follow through on the apex court’s order in the case.
