Court raps defence for adjournment plea

Mumbai: The

sessions court

on Saturday pulled up defence advocate

Wahab Khan

for seeking an adjournment for his cross-examination with a “mala fide intention to drag proceedings and harass the witness” and said that his “line of questions shows that he is defending Hafiz Saeed”. Saeed, the chief of Lashkar-e-Taiba, is the alleged

26/11

mastermind. The sharp rap came after Khan, who is the lawyer for suspected LeT operative Sayed Zabiuddin Ansari alias Abu Jundal, who is incarcerated at Arthur Road jail and is facing trial in India, insisted on asking questions on whether

David Headley

, the part-Pakistani, US national, deposing as approver via a video-conference facility from an undisclosed location in the US, could identify photos of persons shown to him earlier. Special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam objected to his questions as irrelevant. Special trial court judge G A Sanap said, “It appears that you are cross-examining for Hafiz Saeed.” He recorded in his note that Khan was asking him “to identify pictures of terrorists of Pakistan”. Through the fourth day of his cross-examination, the judge asked Khan to focus on the 26/11 case at hand and in defence of his client Jundal and not to ask irrelevant questions. But he also allowed him to ask certain questions, which Nikam opposed. At 12.10pm, though, when Khan sat down saying he had exhausted the questions he planned and would proceed after seeking instructions from Jundal, the judge offered him an hour to confer with the accused via video-link in the court premises itself. Khan, though, opposed that and asked Jundal if he wished to meet in person. Jundal said he preferred that. In an application, he wrote, Jundal “insisted’’ on meeting in jail. The judge who asked Khan why he had not met Jundal all these days, he “lamely” said he couldn’t due to the holidays. The court has been working through Holi and Good Friday. The judge said he would have given him permission as he had in the past and asked police to check and tell who had met with Jundal in jail. The police said Khan’s colleague advocate Ishrat Khan had met Jundal for two hours just on Friday and earlier on March 11, too. Khan later told TOI that his colleague did not come to court on Saturday and he has been unable to discuss what Jundal said. “The grounds for adjournment is just to show that he has been given no opportunity to cross-examination,” said the judge. Khan attracted further ire when he sought an adjournment on the ground that he was “tired and it was too hot at 38 degree Celsius” to work. “When Wahab Khan says he is an officer of court to remind the court of his role, the exercise undertaken by him is contrary to his statement,” said the judge in his order, rejecting the adjournment plea. Nikam later made a plea to have the remark about Hafiz Saeed expunged from the record. He said, “Khan had no malice at heart even though he may have asked irrelevant questions to prolong the proceedings.”