Iqbal Haider, Secretary General of HRCP, has strongly condemned extension of the illegal detention of Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan, President of Supreme Court Bar Association and Ali Ahmed Kurd, Member Pakistan Bar Council and continued illegal detention of former Justice Tariq Mehmood, former President of Supreme Court Bar Association.
"This illegal decision of the present regime is not only without any legal or moral reason or justification but is on account of personal vengeance and vendetta, only because these senior leaders of the lawyers community had successfully pleaded the case of the Chief Justice Mr Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary and have played and are continuing to play a commendable heroic role in the lawyers movement for independence of judiciary, rule of law, freedom of press and restoration of true uncontrolled democracy," he said in a statement on Wednesday.
Haider expressed his shock and dismay that despite repeated requests to the federal and provincial governments as well as to the jail authorities, Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan, who is also a prominent central leader of PPP, Former Federal Minister and MNA was not even allowed, against all norms of decency and ethics, to attend the funeral or soyam or to personally offer condolence to the bereaved family and his party peers on the most condemnable tragic assassination of his leader Mohtarma Banazir Bhutto.
He recalled that one day before Eid-ul-Azha Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan was released for three days to enable him to celebrate Eid but was re-arrested on the same day at Chakri interchange on the motorway and was manhandled by plainclothes policemen. He was then driven around and about Chakri and Chakwal in the middle of the night in an open police van and brought to Lahore in the morning. The reprieve granted to him was also cancelled.