Daily Times

The government on Thursday requested the Supreme Court to grant another three weeks to submit its report on the Army Public School (APS) attack case, a private TV channel reported.

A total of 147 people, 132 of them children, were martyred when Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants stormed the APS-Warsak School, in Peshawar, in 2014 – one of the darkest days in the country’s history.

As per an earlier court directive, the government was to furnish the report, signed by Prime Minister Imran Khan, by December 10. However, the government had sought three weeks’ time from the apex court on Dec 9 to submit the report.

The new request for extension made today said the committee set up by Prime Minister Imran Khan had already met the parents of the deceased students once and a second meeting was expected soon to satisfy them.

The SC was informed last month that the premier, on the court’s suggestion, had constituted a four-member cabinet committee to meet the aggrieved parents comprising federal Minister for Human Rights Dr Shireen Mazari, Economic Affairs Minister Omar Ayub Khan, Inter-Provincial Coordination Minister Dr Fehmida Mirza and Minister for States and Frontier Regions Sahibzada Mohammad Mehboob Sultan.

At the last hearing of the case on Nov 10, a three-judge SC bench headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan Gulzar Ahmed had ordered that the parents of the martyred children should be heard by the government within four weeks and a report signed by the prime minister be placed before the apex court for consideration.

The apex court had noted that the prime minister had made a statement before it that the government was conscious of its responsibilities and taking all possible steps and actions to ensure that the bereaved parents got proper justice and those people who were responsible for the attack or those who had failed to perform their responsibilities were taken to the task and dealt with in accordance with the law.

It had observed that the parents of the APS students were unable to accept the deaths of their children and squarely blamed certain individuals for dereliction of duties.

An earlier order of October 20 had recalled that the mothers of the deceased children complained that no first information report had been registered against the persons, who were responsible to ensure the security of the APS, Peshawar. They said that persons sitting in high offices had not been taken to task nor they had been declared responsible for neglecting their duty resulting in the death of 147 innocent schoolchildren.

The mothers said the then army chief retd Gen Raheel Sharif, the then interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the then chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pervez Khattak, the then corps commander of Peshawar Hidayatur Rehman, the then director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence retd Lt Gen Zaheer-ul-Islam and the then interior secretary Akhtar Ali Shah were the people who were at the helm of the affairs and ought to have known about the happening of the incident but they neglected performance of their duty to the extent that the massacre of the school children happened.

On Oct 5, 2018, former chief justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar had appointed a judicial commission to probe the massacre, asking the late Peshawar High Court chief justice Waqar Ahmed Seth to nominate a PHC judge for the task.

Justice Mohammad Ibrahim Khan of the Peshawar High Court conducted the proceedings and presented the commission’s report, which the Supreme Court ordered to be made public.

The commission observed in its 525-page report it was regrettable that the APS episode had tarnished the image of the armed forces. It took to task the Askari Guards, as well as the other guards on duty, for “inertia in the face of initial heavy firing by the terrorists”.

The commission’s report consisted of statements by the bereaved families, evidence given by the bureaucracy, the police and the military. It made a special mention of “the belated response” to the assault by the security detail and highlighted the grievances shared by parents of the Shuhada (martyred students).

“Had the force shown a little more response and could engage the militants in the very beginning of the attack, the impact of the incident might have been lesser,” the report observed.

It praised the MVT-2 and the Quick Response Force for blunting the terrorists’ advance towards a student block through their prompt action. “Our country was at war with an enemy which carried out occult activities and let loose terrorism which hit the highest point in 2013-14,” the report recalled. But it does not mean that our “sensitive installations and soft targets could be forsaken as a prey to terrorist attack”, the commission stressed.

The report was submitted to the SC on July 9, 2020, and in August 2020, the apex court had ordered the AG to get instructions from the federal government on the report. In September 2020, the SC had ordered the government to make the report public.