KARACHI — The death penalty hanging as the sword of Damocles over his head, Pakistan’s ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif appeared in a special anti-terrorism court today and defiantly charged his military captors with hijacking his elected government.
A convoy of paramilitary Rangers and police vehicles brought him to the court amid tight security. Wearing a dejected look, Sharif sat almost bowed, in the rear side of an armored personnel carrier. He complained before the judge, Zamir Hussain Jaffery, that the soldiers who staged a coup d’etat against his elected government Oct. 12 kept him incommunicado at Rawalpindi, which also houses the general headquarters of the army, one of his lawyers told the waiting newsmen outside the court.
Reminiscent of KGB treatment of dissidents who were sent to Siberia in Communist Russia, he complained that he was then huddled to the wintry hill station of Murree, one of the main defense counsel, former advocate general Iqbal Raad, told journalists. Raad said the sacked premier told the court that he had repeatedly been asking his captors about his guilt or offense but that none even whimpered. Lawyers and journalists, who were denied entry into the court premises, were complaining that it was almost an “in-camera trial” — though Sharif’s main tormentor, army Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who appointed himself the chief executive of the country two days after the coup, had promised a fair and transparent trial.
Lawyer Iqbal Raad denied the official stand that Sharif was in police custody, saying that the ousted premier was in the army’s custody, which would be challenged in the high court of Sindh, Pakistan’s southeastern province. “This is a fit case for a habeas corpus petition,” said another defense lawyer (ret.) Justice Aftab Farrakh. According to Pakistan penal code section 402-B anyone found guilty of complicity in a hijacking bid could be sent to the gallows or awarded life imprisonment. The anti-terrorist court delayed the charge-sheeting of Sharif for one more week until Nov. 26 — the police were supposed
to submit the charge sheet against him today.
Minutes before Sharif arrived, battle-ready police beat up journalists with staves, leaving one scribe wounded and the glasses of another broken. Women activists of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League, could also not escape the police wrath. One of them, Tooba Durrani, was lifted from behind by a policeman and thrown into a police van. Pakistani
segregation laws forbid male cops from touching women. In all, six women were arrested, though most of their male counterparts avoided coming to the court.
The court also heard that one of the co-accused in the alleged hijacking bid needed psychiatric help as the authorities were pressuring him to turn into a confessional witness against the deposed premier. Fears abound that the army junta may oversee the hanging of Sharif — hanging elected, powerful premiers is not something new in Pakistan: Two decades back, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of former premier Benazir Bhutto, was judicially assassinated during the rule of late military dictator Ziaul Haq.
Sharif’s son Hasan sharif has already appealed to President Clinton to help save the life of his father and all other family members who are confined to their homes, under army’s protective custody. Pakistan has remained under army rule for nearly a quarter century since independence from British rule in 1947. The country regarded as one of the world’s few remaining lands of coups d’etat.
