PESHAWAR, Jan 14: The Peshawar High Court (PHC) on Monday dismissed a bail petition of a Bulgarian woman and her Pakistani husband, seeking their release. The couple has been charged with drug trafficking.
Due to boycott of lawyers, the counsel of the woman, Veselina Gedrgieva Mircheva, 35, did not appear before the court and in his absence a single bench of the PHC comprising Justice Jehanzeb Raheem dismissed the petition, observing that the applicants did not deserve to be released on bail.
She was married to a Pakistani, Shehbaz Ali, a resident of Faisalabad about 13 years ago.
They have three children and she is in an advance stage of pregnancy. Mr Ali, along with her wife, was arrested at the Peshawar International Airport on July 28, 2007 by officials of the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF). According to the ANF officials, they spotted a lady carrying an infant and a trolley-bag and during its search they recovered 8.9 kilograms of fine quality heroin.
As per the version of the ANF officials, the woman, who could speak broken Punjabi, told the interrogators that her husband, Shehbaz Ali, had visited Bulgaria about 13 year ago and had married her.
She added that later on they came to Pakistan and started residing in Faisalabad.
The woman stated that she had three children named Maria, Danyal and Christina. She claimed that they were asked by a narcotics dealer called Pehlawan to carry drugs to a foreign country from Peshawar for which they would be paid 600 Euros to which they had agreed.
On Aug 23, 2007, a special anti-narcotics court dismissed the couple’s bail application. The presiding officer of the court had observed that the applicants had used their motherland for such a heinous crime and they did not deserve to be released on bail.
Later on, the Chairman of the Voice of Prisoners, Noor Alam Khan, filed their bail petition in the PHA.
However, as the lawyers have been boycotting the superior courts since Nov 3, her case could not be argued.
In her bail petition her counsel had also adopted the plea that she was entitled to bail on medical grounds.
Source: Dawn
Date:1/15/2008
