After PPP’s Zardari, Manj: Sana third politician facing drug charges

ISLAMABAD: Senior Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Rana Sanaullah is the third politician facing the drug smuggling charge over the past few decades.

Both the other politicians were finally acquitted of the allegation after going through a tedious round of litigation for years. Rana Sanaullah’s fate will be first decided by the anti-narcotics court, then by the Lahore High Court (LHC) and later the Supreme Court, a process that will obviously take long to conclude.

Back in 1998 under Nawaz Sharif’s rule, Lahore police had booked Zardari and two others, Arif Baloch and Shorang Khan, in the drug trafficking case. Zardari was implicated after the confessional statement of the two other accused, who undertook that he provided drugs to them to smuggle abroad.

Ten years later, Zardari was exonerated of the charge. He had pleaded through his lawyer, Latif Khosa, that the case was politically motivated and meant to defame him. He argued that dragging out this case would be an abuse of the law. It’s fake, fabricated, and this black chapter be closed, he stressed. The anti-narcotics court had awarded death sentence to Arif Baloch.

In a tweet he posted after Rana Sanaullah’s arrest, Col (retd) Khalid Munir [who was in army at the time] wrote on Monday that a narcotics case was made against Zardari too. The then director general of ANF (a federal government’s subordinate but independent institution), Maj-Gen Mushtaq, who refused to register the fake case, was removed and an officer of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) was appointed as the ANF chief. The then army chief [Gen Jehangir Karamat] was abroad. He came back and removed the FIA guy. A recently appointed federal minister played dirty role. The case against Zardari was later not proved, Khalid Munir said.

The other politician, who had faced the narcotics smuggling case, was Munawar Manj, a former member of the National Assembly of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and ex-member of the House committee on narcotics, hailing from Sheikhupura.

In 1995 when the Centre was being ruled by Benazir Bhutto and Punjab by Sardar Aif Nakai, the Punjab Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) had claimed to have recovered 35kg of heroin and 30kg of charas from the possession of Manj’s driver Sattar and guard Mohammad Siddique, who were allegedly taking the contraband to Lahore. Manj was arrested by the ANF and booked on drug-trafficking charges following the statements of the co-accused. All three accused were sentenced to death by the trial court on Aug 10, 2001. The contraband was allegedly recovered from a car with a PPP flag crested on its plate on the Lahore-Sheikhupura Road.

In January 2003, the LHC set aside the capital punishment and one-million-rupee fine awarded to Manj. It also commuted the capital punishment of Mohammad Siddique and Abdus Sattar to life imprisonment.

In 2008, the Supreme Court had thrown away state’s appeal against the LHC’s acquittal of Manj. A three-member bench comprising Chief Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar, Justice Ijazul Hassan and Justice Chaudhry Ejaz Yousaf that had taken up identical appeals of the ANF against Manj’s acquittal and commutation of sentences of two other co-accused from capital punishment to life, dismissing the cases on the grounds that the co-accused had already served the jail term.

A separate apex court bench had earlier granted bail to Manj but had ordered not to release the co-accused before its decision on the appeal even if they complete their sentence. The ANF had argued in the Supreme Court that serious miscarriage of justice had been committed by the LHC by commuting the sentences of the two accused and acquitting Manj.

Advocate Malik Mohammad Qayyum, while defending Manj, had asserted that the entire case against his client was set up to teach him a lesson for switching loyalty besides the case also lacked strong evidence to establish the involvement of Manj.

Lawyer Chaudhry Ghulam Murtaza Khan representing a co-accused told the court that neither Ikram Bandial, the investigating officer, an important witness in the case, ever appeared before the trial court nor was the impounded car presented in evidence before the trial court.

However, ANF lawyer Khawaja Sultan (father of Khawaja Haris, advocate) had pleaded that the during the interrogations, both the co-accused had confessed that the contraband items belonged to Manj, who had contested previous general elections on the PPP ticket from Sheikhupura but later changed his loyalty by joining ruling PML-Q.

In 2001, a newspaper owner, Rehmat Shah Afridi, had also been sentenced to death by an anti-narcotics court after he was charged with drug smuggling by the ANF. On his appeal challenging the conviction, the LHC had on June 3, 2004 reduced the death sentence to life imprisonment. He had claimed that he was punished because he had published a story.

When a senior politician was asked to comment on the arrest of Rana Sanaullah and the cases of Zardari and Manj, he said whatever happened yesterday or today was wrong, adding wrongs of the past should never be the basis of committing more wrongs.

He lamented that almost everyone in one’s respective tenure resorted to foul play to settle personal or political scores.