Daily Times

LAHORE: Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) chief Tahirul Qadri demanded on Tuesday that Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif should immediately step down after an inquiry report had held him ‘responsible’ for killing of 14 people in Model Town some three years back.

Qadri said the name of Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif along with his address and other officials responsible for the Model Town tragedy was clearly mentioned in the commission’s report.

Throwing light on the party’s over three-year-long struggle to seek justice, Qadri told a press conference that the Punjab government put all-out efforts to trash the Model Town incident report. He said that the PAT leadership did not let the case die out despite the provincial government made all efforts to divert the attention of the authorities concerned from the commission’s report. “We did not form the commission … it was solely constituted by the Punjab government after terming it a serious public concern and appointing Justice Baqar Najafi as head of the commission,” he said. Despite all these facts, the provincial government was still averse to releasing the Justice Baqar Najafi inquiry report into killings of 14 PAT activists, he said.

Hailing Lahore High Court (LHC)’s decision of releasing the report of the judicial inquiry into Model Town killings, Qadri said that his party had been waiting for the justice for past over three years.

Published in Daily Times, December 6^th 2017.