Human rights lawyer Imaan Mazari, who was re-arrested hours after being released on bail a day earlier, was on Tuesday remanded in the custody of Islamabad Police for three days against a new case pertaining to alleged terror financing.
Additional District and Sessions Judge Abual Hasnat approved Mazari’s physical remand on prosecutor Raja Naveed’s request. Subsequently, police took her into their custody and left the judicial complex premises.
Mazari was arrested on Monday afternoon in a new terror case from outside Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail within hours of being granted bail in a sedition case by an Anti-Terrorism Court. The case in which she has been remanded to police custody, registered under the Anti-Terrorism Act, pertains to alleged terror financing for the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), whose rally she was addressing when she made a controversial speech against state institutions.
During proceedings on Tuesday, Mazari’s lawyer informed the court that police had failed to inform them about the case in which she was arrested. She also sought permission for her client to meet her mother, former minister Shireen Mazari, which was granted by the judge in the courtroom.
The prosecutor, meanwhile, maintained the police needed Mazari’s custody because they were still collecting evidence against her. Mazari’s lawyer countered by noting it was not necessary for a suspect to be kept in custody in the kind of investigation that the police wished to conduct. “The Supreme Court said that it is not necessary to arrest the suspect in every case,” she argued. “Imaan Mazari is a lawyer herself, she is not running away,” she said, while describing the registration of a terror financing case against her client as victimization.