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Tuesday March 19, 2024

Haj scams

By our correspondents
March 27, 2017

Back in 2010, the political world was rocked when Azam Swati, then the science and technology minister and a member of the JUI-F, accused the religious affairs minister Hamid Saeed Kazmi of the PPP, of corruption. Swati alleged that Kazmi, DG Haj Rao Shakeel Ahmed and former joint secretary of religious affairs Raja Aftabul Islam hired substandard buildings for housing pilgrims in Makkah at exorbitant rates and received kickbacks in the process. Government policy states that any housing for pilgrims should be no more than 200 metres from the places of worship but Shakeel, along with the other accused, paid huge rates for buildings in remote areas. The then prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s son, Abdul Qadir Gilani, was also implicated in the scandal when PML-N MNA Pirzada Syed Imran Shah accused him of receiving a luxury vehicle from Rao Shakeel Ahmed. Gilani was later acquitted when the MNA backtracked on his allegations, claiming that the FIA had forced him to concoct the story. Both Swati and Kazmi were removed from the cabinet and relations between the PPP and JUI-F suffered as a result. The Supreme Court took suo motu notice of the Haj corruption allegations and directed the FIA to investigate the matter. Even the Saudi government got involved and complained about Kazmi’s alleged corruption. The three accused were eventually convicted by a special FIA court and have only been released from prison after completing their terms. Nonetheless all of them continued to maintain their innocence and kept pursuing an appeal to overturn their convictions. That appeal has now been successful in the Islamabad High Court, which took the prosecution to task for failing to prove the case and not providing enough evidence.

The verdict issued by the IHC is an indictment of our entire criminal justice system. It claims that much of the evidence provided by the prosecution was inadmissible; and investigation officers were unable to recover the amount that was allegedly given to the accused in the form of kickbacks or show that their assets were in any way the proceeds of criminal activity. Apparently, the state thought that simply asserting that the accused were guilty would be sufficient, and did not present a comprehensive enough case. The guilty verdict delivered by the FIA court also shows the dangers of relying on irregular courts, as they may not have the same standards of evidence as regular courts. Even after all the media coverage given to the Haj scandal, many of the details remain murky and now, thanks to the incompetence of the state, we may never know exactly what happened. This has become typical in corruption cases, where the state is so inept at framing a strong prosecution that it has come to rely on plea bargains and voluntary return. This ends up casting a dark cloud over those who have been accused of corruption but also does not lead to convictions.