Zardari's tongue-cutting case: Accused removed from ECL

The Pakistan government has removed the names of two former top Sindh police officers, accused of wounding ex-President Asif Ali Zardari's tongue during "torture" in 1999, from the Exit Control List.
Removal of former Sindh IG Rana Maqbool and DIG Karachi Farooq Amin Qureshi from the list will enable them to travel abroad, the Express Tribune reported today.
Both the former police officers are accused of wounding the tongue of Zardari during "torturous interrogation" when he was imprisoned during the second tenure of Nawaz Sharif.
Maqbool had filed a case against Zardari for causing injury to himself in jail.
When the Nawaz government was ousted by Pervez Musharraf in 1999, the then IG Maqbool was also implicated in the plane hijacking case along with Sharif and his compatriots, the paper said.

In 2008, when Zardari became the president, the tongue cutting case became active, but Maqbool and Qureshi stayed in Punjab under the wings of PML-N and refused to appear for any court hearing claiming threats to their lives, it said.

The PPP government's interior minister Rehman Malik had put the names of these two men on ECL.
Now, under PML-N government, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar has directed removing the two names from ECL.
The FIR in the case was registered in 2005.
In an application submitted to police then, Zardari alleged that these "people tortured me and tried to kill me at the behest of the government".

Zardari had said that in 1999 he was taken to an interrogation centre from jail and was tortured in custody with the intention to kill him.
During the process his tongue was cut, Zardari alleged.
Zardari, 58, stepped down from the post of president in September after a record five years in power.
He became the first democratically elected president in the history of Pakistan to fully complete his constitutional tenure and be replaced by another elected individual.