Peshawar, Nov 17: A top Pakistani court has ordered to remove from the Exit Control List the names of the wife and children of Dr Shakil Afridi, incarcerated since 2011 for helping the CIA track down Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan’s garrison city of Abbottabad.
A single-member bench of the Peshawar High Court issued the order on Thursday on a writ petition filed by Imrana Shakil, Afridi’s wife.
The exit control list (ECL) is a list of people prohibited from leaving Pakistan for varied legal reasons.
Arif Jan Afridi, petitioner’s counsel, informed the court that his client has been arrested on spying charges for the USA and sentenced to 23 years imprisonment by different courts in Pakistan.
Stating that the names of the wife and children (of Dr Afridi) have been placed on the ECL list by the Government and since then, they cannot move anywhere, the counsel said, “No crime has been proved against my client Imrana Shakil. Neither has she been arrested yet. Names of Imrana Shakil and her children have been placed in the ECL merely on the basis of some reports.”
The Deputy Attorney General told the court that their names have been placed in the ECL on the reports of the security agencies and added that since, currently, there is a caretaker government in the country it doesn’t have the power to remove the names from the ECL.
In his ruling, Justice Abdul Shakoor said that security agencies have no right to place any name on the ECL.
“When they have not committed any crime, how can their names be placed on the ECL? (Therefore) placing their names on ECL is illegal,” Justice Shakoor maintained.
Afridi, in his early 60s, was the top medic in Khyber tribal district and as head of health services had overseen a number of US-funded vaccination programmes. He is alleged to have run a fake vaccination campaign in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad to help the CIA track down Osama.
The al-Qaeda chief was killed in a covert US raid on May 2, 2011. Afridi was arrested from Peshawar later that year.
Initially, he was accused of organising a fake immunisation campaign for the CIA to confirm the presence of Osama. He was given a 33-year sentence on multiple charges of anti-state activities, including extending support to militant outfits. His sentence was later reduced to 23 years. (PTI)
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