PESHAWAR: A Peshawar High Court (PHC) bench on Tuesday referred petitions concerning Sohail Afridi and other Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leaders to the chief justice for a larger bench.
The court acted after the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government and senior police officials failed to submit replies sought on October 20. Judges said the authorities had ignored the deadline.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Advocate General Sanaullah Khan requested three more days. He said his office was awaiting reports from the home department, police and other law enforcement agencies.
Afridi, the non-functional provincial chief minister, has not been seen since governor’s rule and an emergency were imposed on October 11.
A federal minister confirmed the next day that Afridi and some cabinet members were in preventive custody. Afridi’s brother, Mohammad Aamir, approached the court on October 13. He alleged that Afridi had been abducted from the Chief Minister’s House when the emergency began.
Read: Sohail Afridi to Hold Peshawar Press Conference at 3:00 pm PKT
Other petitions concern the alleged disappearance of Assembly Speaker Babar Saleem Swati and lawmakers Junaid Akbar, Dr Amjid Ali, Ikramullah and Aurangzeb Khan.
They also name provincial minister Amjid Ali Khan and former Gilgit-Baltistan chief minister Mohammad Khalid Khursheed.
Petitioners’ counsel Bashir Vazir argued that Article 199 of the Constitution empowered the court to order the production of Afridi and Swati.
He cited a provincial immunity law that he said restricted arrests of assembly members and the speaker. Justice Syed Arshad Ali, who sat on the two-member bench, described the matter as important.
“The chief minister of the province is missing,” he said. Khan compared the petitions with more than 200 detention cases under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance. The bench rejected that comparison, saying the current cases did not fall under the ordinance.
