ISLAMABAD: Cynthia Dawn Ritchie, a Pakistan-based US blogger who accused former interior minister Rehman Malik of raping her in 2011, approached the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Thursday to stop the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) from registering a case against her on the court’s order.
In her petition, Ritchie submitted that the agency should be stopped from filing a case against her as she had not committed any crime.
The IHC had ordered the FIA on Monday to register a case against Ritchie after Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Islamabad chapter’s president Raja Shakeel Abbasi approached the court to lodge a first information report (FIR) against the blogger for levelling “baseless allegations” against slain prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
The blogger, 44, who is residing in Pakistan on and off since 2009, got herself involved in a dogfight last month when she levelled indecent accusations against Bhutto on Twitter. Ritchie followed up her tweets with a string of allegations against top Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leadership, including former premier Yousaf Raza Gilani and former ministers Rehman Malik and Makhdoom Shahabuddin.
Through his petition, Abbasi had sought legal action against Ritchie under Section 22-A of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC).
According to the act, the “bare reading of the law would reveal that only an aggrieved neutral person or his guardian can lodge a complaint. The right provided in subsection (2) to the aggrieved person or his guardian, in case the aggrieved person is a minor for applying the authority for removal of contents further substantiate that in the case under discussion, the law can be set in motion only on the complaint of either an aggrieved ‘natural person’ or his guardian”.
Earlier, the FIA opposed registration of FIR in this matter and claimed that the petitioner had no locus standi to become complainant in the mater for invoking the provisions of the Prevention of Electronic Crime Act, 2016.
