The Sindh High Court (SHC) on Wednesday restrained the police from exhuming lawmaker Aamir Liaquat Hussain’s body for an autopsy to ascertain “actual cause of his death”.
The televangelist children, Ahmad Aamir and Duaa-e-Aamir, filed a petition in the SHC today, in which they expressed gried and said they were “dissatisfied” at the judicial magistrate’s “baseless and meritless” order, appealing for it to be dismissed.
They said that the petition for a post-mortem examination was only filed in order to get cheap and meagre publicity among the general public and nothing else. “There is no need of such exercise of post-mortem of late Dr Aamir Liaquat who has already been buried on June 10.”
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The petition stated that before Hussain’s burial, the police and other relevant authorities were present at the Chhipa morgue, where a thorough external examination of the body was conducted.
“It found that there was no mark of violence, wound, fracture, etc., which clearly transpires that no misshape (sic) had occurred with the deceased and after completing all codal, legal, and religious formalities the exercise of burial was conducted.”
It alleged that the police and the medical board misused their powers for their own whims and wishes for “certain vested interests”.
The police, the family argued, was insistent on conducting the post-mortem but Hussain’s first wife had repeatedly refused it on the pretext of the family’s religious beliefs, adding that exhuming the body more than 10 days later would be disrespectful towards the deceased.
Subsequently, at the hearing today, a two-member bench, comprising Justice Junaid Ghaffar and Justice Amjad Ali Sahito, suspended the judicial magistrate’s orders and issued notices to the police, health authorities and the magistrate.
Following Hussain’s sudden death on June 9, the police had said an autopsy would be conducted but performed only a preliminary examination before relinquishing custody of the body to his family after they refused an autopsy. He was buried the following day.
Last week, a Karachi judicial magistrate had ordered authorities to conduct a post-mortem on the televangelist’s body after which a six-member medical board was constituted for the purpose on June 23.
With input from Dawn