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Despite the fact that it has been 15 years since a significant portion of the Shershah bridge collapsed, numerous inquiries launched by the police, the ministry of communication, and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) have fallen short of producing a conclusive conclusion and bringing justice to the families of the six people killed in the incident on September 1, 2007.
A manslaughter case involving the collapse of Shershah Bridge was filed by the FIA in April of this year against a former National Highway Authority (NHA) chairman, a director of a textile mill, and three other individuals. The case was filed by the FIA in response to Supreme Court directives on April 7, 2010, but the accused were cleared by a sessions court in 2012.
However, despite registration of the FIR, the FIA Agency has so far failed to take action against any of the nominated suspects.
Sources linked the registration of the case and then the stalled investigations with the political developments in the country that saw the change of the government and leadership at various law enforcement agencies.
According to a senior FIA officer who is acquainted with the case, the named suspects had not cooperated with investigators or sought bail before being detained.
Despite filing a FIR in April against the former NHA chief and four others, the FIA makes no arrests.
According to official documents reviewed by Dawn, a FIR (15/2022) was filed on the complaint of the then-chairman of the Prime Minister’s Inspection Commission against former NHA chairman retired major general Farrukh Javed, former NHA member Raja Nousherwan, former project director of the Karachi Northern Bypass Flyover Yousaf Barakzai, Khalid Mirza of ECIL, and Naveed Mirza of the Paracha Textile Mill in relation to the incident that occurred 15 years ago. The sources said the case was registered in Karachi but top FIA authorities had transferred the investigation to agency’s Islamabad office on April 29.
According to the official papers, the suspects, who are alleged to be very powerful, approved the construction of the defective flyover despite timely advice from the concerned experts that the bridge needed to be destroyed and properly redesigned because inherent flaws could not be fixed by corrective measures.
According to the FIA, the bridge’s “faulty design” was created to preserve the land of the textile mills.
The official records showed that the aforementioned suspects, having “criminal intentions and common objective by means of fraud knowingly/deliberately,” soon after realising the inherent flaw in the KNBP design, purposefully constructed the defective flyover on the small plot of land belonging to Paracha Textile Mill for the protection of the mill.
The FIA claimed that M/s ECIL Pvt Ltd developed a “faulty” design and that NHA insisted on building the bridge on a tiny plot of land even though a safe bridge needed greater space. “The bridge fell due to bad design, poorly thought-out structure, and criminal carelessness of the identified accused people.”
The FIA came to the conclusion that the defendants engaged in criminal negligence, causing over Rs427 million in unjustified financial losses to the NHA and corresponding unjustified gains to ECIL and Paracha Textile Mill. Their actions constituted violations of sections 409 (criminal breach of trust by public servant), 109 (abetment), and 5 (2) of the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1947.
The bridge was officially opened by the then-president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, on August 6, 2007, and collapsed a month later, on September 1, 2007.
The Sindh police were ordered to file a FIR and to take punishment against any authorities who failed to do so as soon as the occurrence occurred by the Supreme Court, which had taken suo motu notice of the incident in 2010.
After two years and seven months had passed in April 2010, the SITE-B police registered the case in response to a directive from the Supreme Court. In the same year, charges were made against the defendant and a final charge sheet was presented.But the then-DIG-Investigation Iftikhar Husain Tarrar presented an additional charge sheet that listed every accused person in Column 2 with blue ink and did not send them to trial. Thus, a court in 2012 found the defendants not guilty.
But in 2015, a three-member SC bench reviewed this case in response to an appeal and expressed regret that “despite passing nearly seven years since the bridge collapsed and nearly four years since the date of this court’s interim order, nothing has been brought to the record to show any legal process that was initiated under this court’s direction culminated in its logical conclusion.”
In order to start an investigation into the Shershah bridge collapse, the then-chairman of the PM Inspection Commission in Islamabad, retired Lt Col Saifuddin Qureshi, filed a complaint before the FIA on June 10, 2016, noting that the apex court had not exonerated any of the private respondents or anyone else accused of professional incompetence, criminal neglect, or breach of public duty.
After a comprehensive investigation into the event, the Corporate Crime Circle of the FIA-Karachi filed the FIR against five people on April 12, 2022.
On April 29, nevertheless, the case’s investigation was moved from Karachi to Islamabad.
