Daily Times

LAHORE: Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah on Tuesday dismissed the Model Town inquiry report as ‘full of errors’ and ‘ineffective’.

“The report is defective in the eye of law as it is based on secondary evidence, which is not admissible as per the Evidence Act,” Sanaullah told a press conference. “The government promised when the matter was sub-judice in the high court that it would make the report public and it duly fulfilled its promise,” he added.

The law minister accused Pakistan Awami Tehreek’s leader Tahir ul Qadri (PAT) of creating a fuss over the [Model Town incident] report. “The [Model Town inquiry] report holds no government official responsible for the incident,” he said, adding that ‘not a single word’ in the report holds the chief minister of Punjab Shehbaz Sharif responsible for the incident.

The minister said that the report mentions in certain places that PAT workers offered resistance to police, which later became the reason for police action. “Qadri blames the government for the tragedy, but he incited the people towards violence and he kept saying the night before that the time of martyrdom is here,” Sanaullah said.

“None of the police personnel present at the incident was held responsible,” he said, adding that a chaos was created by PAT workers.The report was not made public because a court trial was underway and the government wanted to protect the rights of all parties involved in the case, the law minister said. Responding to a journalist, Sanaullah said that he could even ‘swear’ that Qadri knew exactly what happened. “He [Qadri] knows exactly what happened and just making this allegation to stir trouble for the government,” he said, adding that it didn’t suit Qadri’s stature, as a religious scholar, to make false allegations.

Published in Daily Times, December 6^th 2017.