New Delhi: Retired Pakistan Supreme Court Judge Javed Iqbal is being called to account over allegations of sexual misconduct that occurred when he was heading the National Accountability Bureau. “When wolves enter an institution, they need to be removed and pointed out,” Noor Alam Khan, the chairman of Pakistan’s Public Accounts Committee, said about Iqbal, who is also the longtime chief of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances.
The PAC chairman has recommended to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif that the retired judge be removed from the enforced disappearances’ commission in light of the alleged sexual misconduct.
The primary allegations date back to a video first leaked on social media in 2019, when Iqbal was NAB chief. According to The Express Tribune, the video featured Iqbal in “clandestine meetings with a woman” named Tayyaba Gul.
Gul appeared before the PAC on Thursday and alleged that Iqbal tried to repeatedly contact her after saving her number from a missing persons application she had filed about her husband’s aunt.
Iqbal, she added, routinely pressured her to meet him personally at the commission’s office. He would threaten to “destroy” her life and not take up her missing persons case whenever she refused to meet. Later, NAB officials arrested her husband in a “fake case” and allegedly physically abused her at the bureau’s Lahore office.
“I was stripped naked. I was taken to a room, cameras were installed, officials conducted frisking, stripped me naked, laughed at me and my videos were made,” The Express Tribune quoted Gul as saying.
On Iqbal’s behalf, the NAB in 2019 had accused Gul and her husband of belonging to a “blackmailer group” after the video first surfaced, and filed a reference against the couple in an accountability court, which subsequently acquitted the two in 2021. The probe into Iqbal was taken up by the PAC more than three years later only after Gul wrote a letter calling for Iqbal to be brought to justice.
Tayyaba Gul’s allegations are among several controversies surrounding the ex-NAB chief, including claims of corruption and abuse of power to meet political favours.
On 22 June this year, Minister for Information and Broadcasting Marriyum Aurangzeb said Iqbal and former Prime Minister Imran Khan should be in jail “for trampling upon the law and justice” of Pakistan, claiming that the ex-PM used the leaked video.
“The NAB chairman was made to shut his eyes towards Malam Jabba and Billion Tree projects and [corruption] cases against former Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister Pervaiz Khattak,” Dawn quoted Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz senior leader Maryam Nawaz Sharif as saying.
About the ongoing PAC probe, Noor Alam Khan said that he sent Iqbal a summons to appear before the PAC but Iqbal wrote back saying he will appear after Eid al-Adha, which takes place this weekend. “If he does not show up again, then I will issue a warrant for Javed Iqbal,” Khan added.
With inputs from Akansha Sengupta
(Edited by Prashant)