No reliable evidence against 3 co-accused, counsel tells court: Daniel Pearl case
HYDERABAD- Rai Basheer Ahmed, the counsel for the co-accused in the Daniel Pearl case, here on Monday started his final arguments which remained inconclusive when the court rose for the day.
The counsel told newsmen afterwards that he confined his arguments on the evidences produced by the prosecution and the depositions of 10 prosecution witnesses, including the judicial magistrate who had recorded confessional statements and the FBI agent, Ronald Joseph, who had examined a laptop, allegedly recovered from one of the co-accused, Fahad Naseem.
The counsel said he told the court that manoeuvring and malafide intentions were involved on the part of the prosecution and the investigating officer in recording the ‘exculpatory confessional statements’ of the co-accused – Fahad Naseem and Salman Saqib.
Mr Ahmed also disputed veracity of the First Information Report (FIR), lodged by Ms Mariane, wife of Daniel Pearl, and said that the alleged kidnapping took place on Jan 23 while the FIR was lodged on Feb 4.
Since the prosecution dropped Ms Mariane as the prosecution witness (PW), her FIR could not be corroborated, the counsel said adding that she did not support the whole story of police about the kidnapping and murder.
The defence counsel indicated that for the first time in the history of trials of criminal cases, the prevalent legal procedure for declaring any absconding accused as ‘proclaimed offender’ (PO) was not followed.
He said that an unidentified person, without any mention of his paternity or address, had been declared PO in the case. Such a proclamation, he said, had to be issued by a court and served through a person liable for deposition under section 514 Criminal Procedure Code (Cr.PC) and the proclamation order must contain the name, father’s name and his residential address with nationality.
He also disbelieved the deposition of a PW, Nasir Abbas, the taxi driver who had identified the principal accused, Omar Sheikh. The lawyer said that there was no corroboratory evidence in this context because Faisal Afridi and Ms Mariane, who could have corroborated his statement, had been dropped by the prosecution as witnesses.
Mr Afridi and Ms Mariane were the only individuals present when the victim had boarded the taxi, he pointed out and said that Nasir Abbas was chance witness.
The counsel drew the court’s attention towards the statement of the Citizen Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) chief, Jameel Yousuf, and said that he deposed nothing against any of his three clients, Fahad Naseem, Syed Salman Saqib and Sheikh Adil.
He challenged the prosecution to prove one single e-mail, produced before the court as an evidence, having been sent from Pakistan to the US.
All the e-mails in question, he pointed out, were sent from the US and addressed to Asra Nomani in Pakistan. Similarly, he said, none of them was sent from Karachi to any organization abroad.
The Jan 27 e-mail was also sent to Ms Nomani from the Wall Street Journal whereas the Jan 30 e-mail originated in the US and was received at the US consulate in Karachi, he added.
The counsel said that the facts showed the co-accused had nothing to do with any of these e-mails or the laptop, claimed to have been recovered from Fahad Naseem on Feb 11.
Mr Ahmed questioned that how it was possible for police to arrest Fahad Naseem and recover the laptop from his possession on Feb 11 as the equipment was already under examination by the FBI agent, Ronald Joseph, on Feb 7.
Highlighting the loopholes in the ‘confessional statements’, the counsel prayed to the court to consider this evidence in the light of the statement-on-oath of the judicial magistrate, that the confessional statements were not voluntary.
He also drew the attention of the court towards other prosecution witnesses, Faisal Noor, Asif Mehfooz Farooqui, Athar Rasheed and Amir Afzal, who had revealed nothing against the co-accused.
Raja Qureshi, the Chief Prosecutor in the case, told newsmen that there was some sort of overlapping in the arguments of Rai Basheer Ahmed and the senior defence counsel, Abdul Waheed Katpar.
Source: Dawn
Date:7/9/2002
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