Strange acquittals saga

KARACHI: No one had taken seriously the claim of Uzair Baloch, former chief of the defunct Lyari Amn Committee, when he — after being handed over to the Sindh police by Rangers — in his first interaction with the media claimed that he would be exonerated by the courts in all the cases registered against him.

Just a week later, a sessions court exonerated him of the charges of attacking police personnel during an operation in the Lyari area in May 2012. And since then, the courts have been acquitting him in one case after the other for lack of evidence against him.

Much before the Sindh Rangers had announced the arrest of Baloch from the outskirts of Karachi in January 2016, both the mainstream as well as social media were carrying reports of his handing over to the authorities in Pakistan by Interpol in Dubai in April 2014.

Soon after his acquittal in the first case in April 2017, the Pakistan Army had taken his custody to try him for espionage under military laws.

His custody was handed back to the police in April 2020 and his trial began in the cases registered against him in different police stations of Karachi.

Contradictory figures

There are contradictory numbers that keep appearing in the media with regard to the total number of cases registered against Uzair Baloch. Some say there are 68 cases, while some claim that the count is above 70. There are also people who believe that some 55 cases have been registered against him.

Senior counsel Abid Zaman, who is defending Baloch in an antiterrorism trial, has said that as far as he knows there is a total number of 65 cases that have been registered against his client out of which some 35 cases are being tried by the sessions courts and 30 cases by the ATCs.

Zaman dispels the impression that all the cases that are being faced by Baloch were originally registered against unknown accused and later on his name was included during the investigation in the light of his much publicized confessional statement before a magistrate and to the joint investigation team constituted by the Sindh government.

The majority of the cases in which Uzair is being tried come under antiterrorism charges. He was nominated in the first information reports (FIRs) directly, informed Zaman.

However the key question remains why Uzair Baloch is being acquitted in one case after the other.

Having vast experience as a prosecutor as well as the defence counsel in various criminal trials, senior advocate Khawaja Naveed Ahmed has said that in Pakistan the prosecution normally relies on corroborative, circumstantial and ocular evidence. “But an expert of criminal law always puts the entire evidence in two categories: the actual evidence and the created evidence” Khawaja Naveed explained. He added that a good prosecutor would never agree to prosecute an accused banking on the created evidence, and a good defence lawyer would tear it to pieces during the cross-examination of witnesses and arguments.

Cases collapse

Irrespective of Mr Naveed’s explanation, it has been observed during Uzair Baloch’s high-profile trials that even the prosecution witnesses, particularly the eyewitnesses, do not appear in court to record their testimonies, causing a complete collapse of the prosecution case. And this is precisely what is happening in the sessions trial against Uzair Baloch.

The prosecutors in many cases are on record with regard to telling the court that witnesses are not recording their testimonies because of fear. So therefore, the rate of acquittal of Uzair in the sessions trials is consequently high. Out of the total number of 20 acquittals, some 15 were in the sessions trials while only five took place in the ATCs.

As far as the ATC trials are concerned, Zaman said that the prosecution witnesses, mostly police officials, do appear before the court and record their testimony. It is the discrepancies in the prosecution cases that have been highlighted during the cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses and arguments that are leading to the acquittal of his client, he added.

A recent case in which the ATC acquitted Uzair Baloch was of the kidnapping and murder of two Rangers personnel in 2013 while they were carrying out intelligence duties in Lyari. Initially, the case was registered against an unknown accused and later on, after initial investigation by an inspector of the Rangers, accused Sher Mohammad — affiliated with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), was arrested in 2015.

The prosecution established its case on the basis of interrogation of Sher Mohammad who allegedly admitted the killing of Rangers personnel and lead the investigators to the recovery of a hand grenade and a 9mm pistol of one of the two Rangers personnel. The prosecution used an alleged confessional statement of Uzair before a magistrate in which besides admitting to other crimes, he confessed to getting Rangers personnel killed by Sher Mohammad in order to implicate his adversary of the MQM in the murder.

The court acquitted both Uzair and Sher Mohammad on the basis that cooperation between the activists of two rival parties who were sworn enemies at the time of committing the offence was highly doubtful, while the Rangers official who had sent an application for the recording of Uzair’s confession was not part of the JIT, and that finally not even a single prosecution witness had testified against Uzair.

Once an accused person’s confession is recorded, the police try to book him in as many blind cases as it can considering it an easy way of getting rid of the unresolved cases, pointed out Khwaja Naveed, and added they need to create evidence leaving a number of lacunas in the prosecution case. “This is what happened with Ajmal Pahari of the MQM earlier”.

In fact in the recent past there are a number of accused against whom dozens of cases on the same pattern have been sent for trial, only for them to be acquitted in all the cases. Even Arshad Pappu, the biggest rival of Uzair Baloch, who was the chief cause of his joining the Abdul Rehman alias Dakait gang, was acquitted in some 60 cases. The last cases being the murder of Uzair’s father Faiz Mohammad alias Faizu who was a transporter by profession.

A case against Uzair on the charges of murdering Arshad Pappu and his two confidants in the DHA soon after his acquittal from Uzair’s father’s murder case is in the final stage of trial in an ATC.