Afridi's Brother Petitions Peshawar High Court to Locate Him

Sohail Afridi's brother has asked the Peshawar High Court to locate him, two days after governor's rule stripped Afridi of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief ministership and his own party said it could not confirm where he was being held.

Muhammad Aamir filed the petition on October 13 through senior counsel Bashir Khan Wazir, naming the KP inspector general of police and the Peshawar capital city police officer (CCPO) among the respondents. According to the Express Tribune, Aamir alleges that armed and masked individuals took Afridi from the Chief Minister's House in Peshawar at around 2pm on October 11, in the presence of the CCPO, and that his whereabouts have been unknown since.

What the petition asks the court to do

The petition invokes Article 199(1)(b)(i) of the Constitution, which lets a high court order a person produced in court to test whether their detention is lawful, along with Articles 4, 9, 10 and 14 and Section 491 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898. Dawn's report names the specific relief sought: a court direction to trace Afridi and produce him if he is found within the court's jurisdiction, a report from the CCPO on the incident and the security arrangements in place that day, preservation of CCTV footage and entry and exit logs from the building, registration of a first information report if none exists, and periodic progress reports until his whereabouts are established. Aamir's petition states plainly that he is not asking the court to find anyone guilty without evidence, only to establish where his brother is.

A near-identical petition was filed on behalf of KP Assembly Speaker Babar Saleem Swati, whose cousin, Waqar Ahmad Khan, alleges Swati was taken from the provincial assembly premises at around 7pm the same day, also in the CCPO's presence.

The gap between official statements

The petitions exist because the government's own account of Afridi's status has not settled into one version. Governor Faisal Karim Kundi said Afridi was in protective custody and in "safe hands," while Minister of State for Interior Talal Chaudhry told Reuters a day earlier that the chief minister and some cabinet members had been "taken into preventive custody," adding that those facing pending cases would be charged and tried and the rest released. PTI's own secretary general, Salman Akram Raja, said separately that he did not know where Afridi was or in what condition, a gap this petition is designed to close through a court order rather than a political statement.

A second front at the National Assembly

The same day, PTI pressed the question in parliament as well. Chief Whip Amir Dogar wrote to National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq asking him to issue production orders for nine MNAs the party says are detained, including KP party president Junaid Akbar, so they could attend the assembly's 30th session. The letter asked the Speaker to take "immediate notice." As of this writing, Dawn's report notes no response from the Speaker's office.

Where this fits in the wider dispute

The recovery petition is separate from the constitutional challenge already before the Peshawar High Court and a planned Supreme Court case arguing that the emergency and governor's rule themselves are unlawful. That earlier case asks whether President Asif Ali Zardari had the constitutional authority to remove a sitting chief minister by proclamation; this one asks a narrower, more immediate question — where Afridi physically is, and under what legal authority, if any, he is being held. The army's deployment in KP under Article 245 and Parliament's subsequent approval of the emergency have proceeded on a separate track regardless of how either court case is resolved.

No hearing date had been set for either recovery petition as of this writing. Build Better Pakistan will update this piece once the Peshawar High Court acts.

Build Better Pakistan's Politics Desk is tracking the legal challenges arising from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's governance crisis.