LONDON: The high-profile defamation trial between Brig (retired) Rashid Naseer and Major (retired) Adil Raja ended here on Thursday as London High Court Deputy Judge Richard Spearman KC brought the focus on slain journalist Arshad Sharif, saying the official Pakistan fact-finding report never implicated the Inter-services Intelligence Agency (ISI) as being behind the assassination – one of the key planks of Adil Raja’s evidence that it was ISI that was behind the killing in Kenya.
As Adil Raja’s lawyer Simon Harding argued in closing submissions that the fact-finding report has to be treated like a jigsaw to reach to the conclusion that the ISI was behind the killing of Arshad Sharif in Kenya three years ago, the judge referred him to the over-600-page report.
The judge remarked that he had gone through the report and it doesn’t implicate the ISI in the killing and that there is no finding that the ISI killed Arshad Sharif and had this been the case, the report would have said so explicitly.
On the last day of the trial, lawyer for the defendant (Adil Raja) was asked to prove why he thought the publications were in the public interest, the credibility of his sources, their veracity, and whether they existed at all in the first place or the stories were made up. The claimant was asked to prove that he had suffered serious harm in the UK as a result of these publications. Both sides presented their case in the afternoon before the judge.
Adil Raja’s lawyer said: “My client accepts the allegations he made are serious but there is no harm. It’s been three years and many would think the damage is already done and over. Rashid Naseer has presented no evidence of the harm he has suffered. The information published by Adil Raja came from reliable sources and their identity couldn’t be revealed to the court as it would put them at high risk.” The judge remarked: “Reliability of the source is always important. If the sources are unreliable and there is a hidden agenda then the information put out could be unreliable. There is no material whatsoever to support the defendant’s case that any particular source told him what to publish. There is no text, no screenshot; the defendant failed to reveal any credible evidence. The defendant had an incredibly bad start; he has made factual allegations of facts; I allowed him to treat his defence as evidence because his witness statement completely failed to deal with public interest.”
The judge was critical of the defendant’s truth defence at the start of the trial because no evidence of truth was presented to support any of the allegations in the case. Adil Raja’s lawyer agreed not to plead the truth defence but the public interest defence is being pleaded, in which statements made by a journalist, acquired through sources, are believed to be true and are shared in the public interest.
Counsel David Lemer for Rashid Naseer set out the law on serious harm and reiterated Naseer’s position that he had received threats, lost opportunities and his reputation had been seriously harmed.
Shehzad Akbar, the former accountability chief in Imran Khan’s govt, Shaheen Sehbai, former editor and analyst, and Syed Akbar appeared in London High Court as witnesses to support Major (retired) Adil Raja in the defamation case. The three of them told the court they were critics of the current government. All of them accepted that they collaborate with Adil Raja for his social media publications and vice versa. Shehzad Akbar said he had no financial arrangement with Adil Raja but Syed Akbar said he and Raja shared the income from Youtube till his channel was terminated.
Shehzad Akbar said that he used to be in regular contact with the ISI when in govt.
The court heard from the claimant’s lawyer that Shehzad Akbar and Rashid Naseer met in 2022 where Akbar asked Rashid Naseer to help speed up cases against Shehbaz Sharif so he could be sentenced but Naseer told him it was not his job. Shehzad accepted he met Rashid Naseer but it was to raise the issue of the establishment’s interference in judiciary by the establishment and brought up the alleged corruption of Mr Mithu when Naseer told him about the alleged corruption of Farah Gogi, former first lady Bushra Bibi’s best friend. Both Sehbai and Akbar accepted they didn’t believe that Rashid Naseer had taken control of the Lahore High Court to manipulate the elections of 2022.
At the heart of the case are around nine publications in which Raja had accused, among other allegations, Rashid Nasser of taking complete control of the Lahore High Court to rig elections of 2023. The judgement will be delivered in a few weeks.