SHC orders disciplinary action against four former investigation officers in missing person case

The Sindh High Court (SHC) has ordered disciplinary action against four investigation officers (IOs) for their failure to conduct a transparent investigation into a missing person case for the last four years.

The direction came on a petition of Rasheeda Begum who alleged that her son Sameer Khan Afridi was picked up by personnel of the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) on August 8, 2016.

A division bench of the SHC headed by Justice Nazar Akbar had taken serious exception to the performance of the IOs of the case during the last four years, and observed that prima facie the investigation in the case was more or less a fraud in the guise of investigation.

The high court observed that the record of the case showed that none of the IOs in the four years had even tried to make an effort to contact the owner of the passenger coach, where the missing person worked as the conductor, to verify and investigate whether or not Afridi was on the passenger bus on the day he went missing.

The high court observed that the petitioner had been living on false hopes for the last four years that the investigation was going on to recover her son and in January 2019 she collapsed during court proceedings when she found out that missing persons picked up by the CTD along with her son had been recovered but her son was not located by the police.

The SHC observed that the statement of Abdul Hafeez, a K-electric employee and a missing person who was later recovered, supported the allegation of Afridi’s mother that her son had been picked up by the CTD. Hafeez had stated that he had seen Afridi in the

custody of the CTD.

The bench observed that sufficient material was available in the statement of Hafeez against the CTD. It observed that the last IO of the case, Syed Ali Anwar Shah, who was the incharge of the case during the last eight months, had not followed any requirements of the standard operating procedure (SOP) for investigations into missing persons and likewise the previous three others IOs namely DSPs Niaz Hussain Khawaja, Syed Hubdar Ali Shah and Safdar Ali Shah had also not showed any satisfactory performance.

The high court observed that these fours DSP had not conducted the investigation of the case in accordance with the basic principles of the investigation.

The SHC directed that an SSP or other high-ups start disciplinary action against the four DSPs for their wilful failure to comply with the SOP for tracing out missing persons and conclude the inquiry within three months. The high court also directed the new IO of the case, DSP Jameel Akhtar Bangash, to recover the missing person and submit a compliance report.

The SHC remarked that if the missing person was not recovered by the next date of hearing, it would order the registration of an FIR against each one of the four former IOs for destroying the evidence and/or deliberately not collecting the possible evidence in order to favour the accused party.

The bench observed that it would also issue a direction for the registration of an FIR against CTD officials for unlawfully detaining Abdul Hafeez for more than three months in their custody and later showing his arrest in a criminal case.