Important records related to the Salmaan Taseer’s murder case mysteriously disappeared from the office of the attorney general (AG) in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) after the appeal of Mumtaz Qadri – Taseer’s self confessed murderer – was fixed for hearing last week.
Sources in the AG office told the media that after the case was fixed before the IHC division bench, they found that the file that contained Qadri’s appeal, his conviction order, police reports and important notes from the prosecutor was not in their records.
Subsequently, at the last hearing of the case on Jan 27, prosecutors had no record related to this case.
An incumbent deputy attorney general, on condition of anonymity, said that the file might have been mixed up with other case files. He said that the file would most probably be found, and even if it was not recovered, it could be reconstructed.
An IHC official said that the file could be reconstructed with the help of judicial records. A separate file of this case is also present at the office of the superintendent of police. The prosecution, he said, can get photocopies of the record either from the judicial record or police file.
He said the files in the IHC’s judicial record and the police version contained the FIR against Qadri, the police investigation report under Section 173 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) commonly known as the challan, the chemical examiner’s report, a list of witnesses, a map of the crime scene, the autopsy report, details of case property and reports of forensic experts.
