Fact or fiction?

It may not help her cause but PML-N Vice President Maryam Nawaz has managed to create quite a stir with a scandalous video and a separate audio she played at her presser, purportedly containing conversations between the accountability court judge, Arshad Malik, who convicted her father former prime minister Nawaz Sharif in the Al Azizia reference case, and a notorious character Nasir Butt - a close aide to Sharif - to claim that the judge was blackmailed into sentencing her father. The next day judge Malik issued a statement, terming the video-audio 'evidence' as false and fabricated, made by twisting his different conversations irrelevant to the present context. He contended that were he to act under pressure he would not have acquitted Sharif in one case and given a guilty verdict in the other, pointing out that he had convicted him in Al Azizia case and acquitted him in the Flagship case. He also claimed that during the hearing of these cases, Nawaz Sharif's representatives met him several times to bribe him and threatened him with dire consequences if he did not cooperate. Mayram, of course, has rejected his statement ascribing it, again, to pressure.
It is worth noting that Maryam also averred that she had vowed to go to the "last limit" to save her father and this (the allegation) was that limit. That though, according to legal experts, would be of little help to him for his are legal problems, which can only be resolved in courts not in news conferences. She, however, appears to have achieved some success, in making the corruption cases controversial, and score political points. Meanwhile, sceptics argue that considering the video-audio material is pretty old since it contains a reference, in the present tense, to former chief justice Mian Saqib Nisar, the Nawaz League should have used this 'evidence' when the cases were being heard by the accountability court under the supervision of a Supreme Court judge. And also that Maryam's allegations cut no ice in view of the fact that she is accused of using Calibri font to fabricate the Avenfield properties trust deed submitted before the court. Nonetheless, the allegations she levelled at the presser resonate with many people because of our unsavoury past. There is the confession of the late chief justice Nasim Hassan Shah that he had upheld the death sentence the Lahore High Court had handed former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto under immense pressure from the Zia government. Then there are two audios from a previous PML-N government's time still available on social media. In one of them Nawaz Sharif's accountability chief Saifur Rehman can be heard telling the then Lahore High Court judge Malik Qayyum, hearing a corruption case against Benazir Bhutto and her spouse Asif Ali Zardari, on his boss' behalf to give them "full dose" - maximum punishment of seven-year imprisonment along with confiscation of properties - to which the judge promises to do as told though explaining that he would go for five-year jail sentence since no other judge gives maximum punishment. In the other audio, Shahbaz Sharif, now the PML-N president, asks the same judge not to disqualify an MNA of his party, and gets his wish. A lot has changed since. The higher judiciary has earned a lot of respect for taking decisions independent of outside pressure.
Since the Nawaz League vice-president has managed to raise some doubts about her father's and her own conviction, these must be removed. The prime minister, Imran Khan, has asked the judiciary to take notice of the alleged video and his government would fully facilitate in any manner necessary to authenticity of the video. We fully endorse the prime minister's view that it would be better if this matter is dealt with by the judiciary and the government does not become a party to this issue.