KARACHI –Council of Islamic Ideology chairman Maulana Mohammad Sheranihas said that no one is above the law and Mumtaz Qadri, the self-confessed killer of former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, was punished for taking the law into his hands.
“I respect Qadri’s religious sentiments but I respect Pakistan’s constitution more,” he said while speaking to journalists in Shikarpur. He (Qadri) might be influenced by ‘religious’ sentiments, the murder was illegal, he said. Qadri, commando of police’s Elite Forcehanged to death inside Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail, was sentenced to death for assassinating the governor on January 4, 2011, in Islamabad.
In October 2015, the Supreme Court of Pakistan maintained the conviction of Qadri by an Anti-Terrorism Court, overturning Islamabad High Court’s March 9 verdict, which had dismissed Qadri’s appeal against his death sentence under the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) but accepted his plea to void Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act’s (ATA).
– Women enjoy all rights under Islamic laws –
On women protection bill, Sherani said that there was no need to legislate a law for women’s protection when they already had all rights secured in all respects under Islamic laws. He said that the bill, recently passed by the Punjab Assembly, was against Article 6 of the constitution and any person violating the constitution should be punished.
Thebill was a violation of Islamic laws and cannot be accepted, he said, and opposed all bills being passed by national and provincial assemblies without recommendations of the council, a constitutional body. Recently, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-F chief MNA Fazlur Rehman also called pro-women enactment a law which is in conflict with Pakistan’s constitution and Islamic laws simultaneously.
