/ 15 February 2007

Nqakula may know where Rashid is, says attorney

Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula may know where deported Pakistani national Khalid Rashid is, Rashid’s attorney claimed in the Pretoria High Court on Thursday.

Zehir Omar, attorney for Rashid’s family, asked a full bench of the Pretoria High Court, headed by Judge President Bernard Ngoepe, to allow him to place ”new information” before them.

He wanted the court to consider the information before they delivered judgement in an application about the legality of Rashid’s arrest and deportation — described by Omar as a ”kidnapping, enforced disappearance and a crime against humanity”.

Omar said he had received a ”shocking” document compiled by Amnesty International, which suggested that Nqakula knew more about Rashid’s whereabouts.

The document contained minutes of the November 2006 meeting of the United Nations’ Committee against Torture, held in Geneva.

It quoted Nqakula as responding to questions about Rashid’s whereabouts by saying that Rashid ”had been visited in Pakistan, inter alia by officials from the Ministry of Safety and Security” and that to his knowledge, Rashid was still in Pakistan.

Omar said demands for more information from the minister about who had visited Rashid, when they did so and reasons for the ”continued concealment” of Rashid’s whereabouts were met with silence.

Mike Bofilatos, advocate for the Department of Home Affairs, on Thursday described the last-minute application as ”nothing short of bizarre” and an abuse of the process of court.

”If they want to attempt to interrogate the minister of safety and security, they can do so, but it must be done in a separate, distinct application, citing the minister as a party. It is not appropriate for us to deal with it,” he said.

Judge Ngoepe wanted to know from Omar why he regarded the information that Rashid was in Pakistan as shocking, and what new information he wanted to place before the court, as the Home Affairs Department had all along said that Rashid was in Pakistan.

Omar said the new information was that Rashid was alive and had apparently been seen by government officials, which was the exact information the family had been seeking all along.

”If someone can tell us where he is, and if his mother can see him, then we don’t need to go further with this case,” he said.

Ngoepe asked Omar about a radio interview he had given earlier in the morning, in which he appeared to have been talking about the application before it came to court.

He warned Omar not to give the impression that he was using the case to seek publicity.

Judgement in the application will be delivered on Friday. — Sapa