ISLAMABAD - The Supreme Court has held that (its) command could not be disregarded by a trial court and the [Sindh] High Court also could not be allowed to poke its nose into its orders through half-baked or artificial reasons.

A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar said this in a judgment on civil society activists’ applications against the SHC verdict of November 28, 2017, in the Shahzeb Khan murder case.

On February 1, the Supreme Court had passed a short order and, as a result, the prime suspect, Shahrukh Jatoi and co-accused Siraj Talpur and Sajjad Talpur were arrested from the apex court premises.

Shahzeb Khan, 20, was shot dead in Karachi on the night between December 24 and December 25, 2012, when he was returning home after attending a wedding ceremony with his sister in Karachi.

The civil society activists had challenged the SHC’s November 28, 2017 order that had set aside an anti-terrorism court order of death sentence to Jatoi, stating that the case did not fall in the Anti-Terrorism Act.

The SHC’s November 28, 2017, order not only disregarded the apex court order of February 22, 2013, but also the SHC division bench order of April 24, 2013.

The top court judgment said: “If such omissions in the order (dated 28.11.2017) were inadvertent, then the same were unfortunate but if the omissions were deliberate then they were nothing but outrageous.”

On April 24, 2013, an SHC division bench had dismissed criminal revision of the accused. They, therefore, challenged it before the apex court, which had also dismissed it on October 21, 2013, as the ATC had already concluded the trial and had convicted and sentenced the suspects.

The apex court judgement noted that the SHC in its (28-10-2017) order twice reproduced the words “as the question of jurisdiction can now well be agitated before the appellate court seized of the matter”, which appeared only as a part of a sentence used by the top court on October 21, 2013.

The judgment further noted that the part of the sentence used by the SC in that order was utilized by the SHC as “an authorization from this court to the high court to reopen and reconsider the issue pertaining to the jurisdiction of the ATC to try the relevant criminal case”.

The court said that the impression gathered or conjured up by the high court was, however, nothing but erroneous and misconceived.

The judgment said: “the trial has to take place independently, without being influenced in any manner from the present proceedings, which observation left it to the trial court as well as the high court to decide the issue of jurisdiction of an ATC independently and without being influenced by the proceedings undertaken in the matter by this court”.

The judgment further said that the complete sentence actually reads as: “In view of the above, we are of the opinion that the challan has been submitted, therefore, the trial has to take place independently, without being influenced in any manner from the present proceedings, in terms of the provisions of Anti-Terrorism Act, particularly, Section 19(7), which provides that the cases have to be decided within a period of seven days by holding day-to-day hearing and also in accordance with the guidelines, which have been provided by this Court to monitor the trial proceedings in the case of Sh. Liaqat Hussain and others versus Federation of Pakistan through Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs and others (PLD 1999 SC 504).”

The judgment said that the sentence, in fact, contained a command that the trial of the case was to be conducted in terms of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 and the ATC was to proceed with the trial independently and without being influenced by any extraneous factor.