AJK court rejects poet Ahmed Farhad’s bail petition

MUZAFFARABAD: Agreeing with the contentions of the prosecution, an anti-terrorism court in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) rejected the bail plea of detained poet Ahmed Farhad Shah, holding that the legal points advanced by his counsel did not apply to the case in hand.

Mr Shah, who had gone missing from his Islamabad residence on May 15, had surprisingly “re-surfaced” in Gujjar Kohala, a village near the AJK border with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, on May 29 when the Islamabad High Court was hearing a petition seeking his recovery.

Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani, the senior puisne judge of the IHC, had fra­med 12 questions mostly related to the functions and obligations of spy agencies i.e. Inter-Serv­ices Intelligence, Military Intelli­gence and the Intelligence Bureau.

The court was informed by AGP Man­soor Usman Awan that Mr Shah had been arrested under Sec­tion 186 of the Azad Penal Code (APC) — the AJK version of Pakis­tan Penal Code — and was kept at the Dhirkot police station of Bagh district.

Later, the same afternoon, Mr Shah was handed over to Saddar police station in Muzaffarabad, where he was booked under nine sections of APC and one each section of Telegraph Act and Anti-Terrorism Act according to a statement given to his family by Dhirkot police.

Initially, the Saddar police station’s FIR (205/24) of May 13 was kept ‘secret’ by police, but later it emerged that it was registered against 150-200 unidentified “miscreants” for “inciting violence, blocking roads and attacking the convoy of paramilitary force Rangers at different spots during its journey from Bararkot to Muzaffarabad on May 13 at the behest of Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC)”.

In his arguments on Mr Shah’s bail petition, his counsel Karam Dad Khan had agitated the very point, maintaining that his client was not even a nominated accused in the FIR in question and that he had been implicated in the case with mala fide intentions.

The counsel also questioned how his cli­­­ent could instigate a mob in Mu­­zaf­far­abad to commit any unlawful act when he was physically present in Islamabad, and there was no internet service in any part of AJK during the protests.