Model Town Tragedy: Najafi Report and State Accountability

Independently written and published by Shahbaz Shah Legal Journal.

Why Model Town remains a current legal issue

The Model Town tragedy is not closed history. On 17 June 2014, an operation by the Punjab police outside the Minhaj-ul-Quran Secretariat and the residence of Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri in Lahore ended with 14 people dead and scores injured. Twelve years later, no final public account has answered the central questions of criminal and command responsibility.

The latest publicly available procedural statements reinforce that conclusion. On 19 August 2026, Pakistan Awami Tehreek's legal spokesperson said that a seven-member Lahore High Court bench had completed the hearing concerning the fresh Joint Investigation Team, but that its decision had not yet been announced. That is the position of an interested party and must be identified as such. The latest neutral report located during verification, published in March 2025, confirmed that the private complaint was still being heard by an anti-terrorism court when a transfer petition became ineffective after the presiding judge was transferred.

There is therefore no responsible basis for describing Model Town as a matter in which justice has been completed. The State operation, the findings of the judicial inquiry, the resistance to publication of that inquiry, the contested investigations and the prolonged private complaint form one continuing story of institutional failure.

This was an exercise of State power

Model Town did not begin as violence between two private groups. Police officers, administrative officials, public vehicles, weapons, command structures and the authority of the provincial government were engaged in an official operation said to concern the removal of barriers.

That fact changes the legal and constitutional standard. The State possesses coercive powers that an ordinary citizen does not. It may deploy police, restrict movement and use lawful force, but only for a lawful purpose and only to the extent necessary and proportionate. When an exercise of that power causes death, the State carries a heightened obligation to establish what happened, preserve the evidence, identify every legally responsible person and place the matter before an independent court without avoidable delay.

Articles 4 and 9 of the Constitution protect lawful treatment and life. Article 14 protects dignity. Article 25 requires equality before law and equal protection of law. Article 19A gives constitutional importance to access to information in matters of public importance, subject to lawful regulation. These guarantees cannot be reduced to promises that operate only when the alleged offender is a private citizen. Their most serious test arises when State officials or political authorities may themselves be implicated.

The responsibility to deliver justice belonged to the State from the first day. It was never reasonable to expect bereaved families to reconstruct, through a private complaint, the communications and chain of command of institutions whose records were controlled by the government itself.

What the Najafi Tribunal actually found

The Punjab government appointed Justice Ali Baqar Najafi of the Lahore High Court as a one-member tribunal under sections 3 and 5 of the Punjab Tribunals of Inquiry Ordinance, 1969. The tribunal began work on 19 June 2014, completed its inquiry on 9 August 2014 and delivered its report to the Punjab government.

The report did not convict any person, nor could it substitute for a criminal trial. Its findings were nevertheless exceptionally serious.

Justice Najafi concluded that the operation planned under the chairmanship of the then Punjab law minister resulted in killings that could have been avoided. He found that the scale of the police offensive was not proportionate to the resistance offered by the PAT workers. He recorded that police officers from the top to the bottom of the command structure did not identify the person under whose command firing took place.

The tribunal treated that silence as deliberate concealment, not as a minor gap. It found that officials had attempted to protect one another from possible legal consequences. It also stated, in stark language, that police officers had actively participated in the massacre and that the conduct of the authorities created genuine doubts about their innocence.

These were findings of an official judicial inquiry constituted by the provincial government itself. They did not establish the ingredients of a criminal offence against each proposed accused, but they plainly required a prompt, independent and technically capable criminal investigation.

The report raised grave questions about the government of the time

The Najafi Report did not leave the political and administrative context untouched. It examined the meeting held on 16 June 2014 under the chairmanship of the then law minister, the decision to remove the barriers immediately, and the consent attributed to the Chief Minister's secretary. It questioned the purpose, timing and scale of an operation carried out while political mobilisation by PAT was already a matter of concern to the government.

The tribunal also examined then Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif's position that, after seeing the situation on television, he ordered the police to disengage. Justice Najafi found that the reports and affidavits before the tribunal did not show that any such direction was conveyed to or received by the officers in the field. The report treated the disengagement position as an afterthought defence.

That finding does not permit a writer to pronounce the then Chief Minister criminally guilty. It does, however, destroy any honest argument that his explanation required no further scrutiny. When the highest executive authority in the province offers an account that a judicial tribunal finds unsupported by the operational record, a rigorous and independent investigation is not optional. It is the minimum response required by the rule of law.

The report raised further questions about changes in senior police and district administration immediately before the incident, the absence of a satisfactory explanation for those changes, the failure to obtain appropriate legal advice before launching the operation and the government's refusal to confer the fuller powers sought by the tribunal under section 11 of the 1969 Ordinance.

Taken together, these matters raised direct and legitimate questions about the Punjab government of the time: what political objective shaped the operation, who approved its timing and scale, who controlled the officers on the ground, whether an order to disengage was ever given, and why officials did not disclose who commanded the firing.

Those questions are not partisan inventions. They arise from the inquiry established by that same government.

Who ordered the firing?

The most basic question remains unanswered in the public record.

A large, armed police deployment operates through hierarchy. Personnel are assembled and briefed. Units are assigned positions. Weapons and ammunition are issued. Senior officers communicate with the field. Operational decisions are transmitted and, when circumstances change, commanders may escalate or stop the use of force.

An effective investigation therefore had to determine:

• who ordered the immediate operation;
• who selected the timing and number of personnel;
• who authorised and issued weapons and ammunition;
• who commanded each deployed unit;
• what was communicated by telephone and wireless before and during the firing;
• whether firing resulted from individual acts or an order;
• who had authority to stop it after casualties occurred; and
• whether any record was suppressed, altered or never produced.

The person who pulls a trigger may bear personal responsibility. But where unlawful force is organised, authorised, facilitated or knowingly allowed to continue, responsibility does not necessarily end with the lowest-ranking officer holding the weapon. That is why the failure to reconstruct command responsibility is not a technical omission. It is the central investigative failure in the case.

Concealing the report deepened the State's failure

The Punjab government received the inquiry report in August 2014 but did not voluntarily publish it. The victims and their families had to litigate for access.

In September 2017, a Lahore High Court judge ordered publication. The provincial government challenged that decision. On 5 December 2017, a three-member Lahore High Court bench dismissed the government's appeals and directed release of the report. It was published later that day, accompanied by a separate review document criticising it.

This history raises a question that cannot be avoided: if the inquiry was created to discover the truth about citizens killed during a State operation, why did the State resist allowing those citizens' families and the public to read its findings?

The government was entitled to contest legal questions about the report's status and evidentiary effect. But legal entitlement to appeal does not erase political and institutional responsibility for the result: a report completed in 2014 remained hidden for approximately three years, while the people most affected by it were forced to seek disclosure through constitutional litigation.

Publication itself was not justice. It merely allowed the public to see why a stronger investigation was required.

An inquiry report is not a conviction - but it cannot be treated as nothing

Legal discipline is essential in a case charged with grief and politics. An inquiry tribunal does not conduct a criminal trial. A report cannot remove the presumption of innocence, dispense with admissible evidence or establish every accused person's individual role beyond reasonable doubt.

That limitation has too often been used to divert attention from the State's actual duty. The fact that the Najafi Report could not itself convict anyone was the beginning of the investigative obligation, not its end.

Once the report identified disproportionate force, conflicting official accounts, deliberate silence and possible concealment, investigators were required to obtain the evidence that a criminal court could lawfully evaluate: operational orders, duty rosters, arms and ammunition records, wireless logs, call data, video evidence, medical and ballistic material, contemporaneous documents and testimony capable of tracing the chain of command.

If such evidence was never collected, was collected late, became unavailable or could not be placed before the court because the investigation was ineffective, the resulting evidentiary weakness cannot honestly be presented as proof that the system worked. It may instead be evidence of why the system failed.

The victims were forced into a private complaint

Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran pursued a private complaint before the Anti-Terrorism Court under the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Anti-Terrorism Act. On 7 February 2017, the trial court summoned a large number of police and administrative officials but declined to summon 12 political and senior administrative figures sought by the complainant.

The complainant challenged the non-summoning order. On 26 September 2018, a three-member Lahore High Court bench, by a majority of two to one, declined to interfere. The majority required sufficient material connecting each proposed accused with the offences at the summoning stage. One judge dissented.

That legal outcome must be stated accurately. The refusal to summon particular people was not a finding that the operation had been lawful, that the Najafi Report was false or that no senior responsibility existed. It meant that the material legally available in that proceeding did not satisfy the majority's threshold for summoning those proposed accused.

The deeper institutional question remained: why was a private complainant expected to uncover evidence located inside the provincial government, police command and administrative machinery? Criminal responsibility must be proved individually, but the duty to investigate a State operation belongs first to the State.

The fresh JIT became litigation about an investigation

In December 2018, Supreme Court proceedings ended after the Punjab government undertook to constitute a fresh Joint Investigation Team. A five-member JIT led by A.D. Khawaja was notified in January 2019.

The fresh investigation offered a possible route to examine senior officials and political personalities left outside the private complaint's summoning order. Police officers facing trial challenged the JIT's legality. On 22 March 2019, a Lahore High Court bench, by a two-to-one majority, suspended its operation.

The legal issue was substantial: whether another investigation could lawfully be constituted after earlier investigation, submission of a report and commencement of trial. The rights of accused persons to lawful process had to be protected. But the practical outcome is indefensible from the perspective of justice: the investigation into 14 deaths became paralysed by years of litigation over whether that investigation could proceed at all.

According to PAT's legal spokesperson on 19 August 2026, the seven-member bench later completed hearing the JIT matter but had not announced its decision. Because this current-status claim comes from the complainant's side rather than a published court order, it should not be overstated. It nevertheless matches the larger public record: no final JIT report has produced a completed accountability process.

The private complaint also became a marathon

The trial did continue, but at a pace that itself raises rule-of-law concerns. In February 2024, the Anti-Terrorism Court rejected PAT's request to stop the case pending the fresh JIT and said the matter would be heard twice a week. The court was told that 123 hearings had already taken place. By August 2024, public reporting stated that 98 witnesses had been examined. Several accused had by then obtained acquittal.

In March 2025, the Lahore High Court disposed of a petition seeking transfer of the private complaint to another anti-terrorism court because the judge whose impartiality had been questioned had already been transferred. The order did not end the private complaint; it removed that particular transfer dispute.

This procedural history cannot be called timely justice. Witnesses age, memories weaken, officers retire, records become harder to locate and parties die. Delay is not neutral where the State controls much of the evidence. Over time, delay can make accountability practically impossible even without any formal decision to prevent it.

Presumption of innocence does not erase institutional responsibility

Neither Shehbaz Sharif, Rana Sanaullah nor any other named political, administrative or police figure can lawfully be declared criminally guilty merely because of office, political association or an adverse inquiry observation. Criminal liability is personal and must be established in a competent court through admissible evidence and due process.

But the presumption of innocence protects individuals from punishment without proof. It does not require the public to pretend that the State discharged its institutional obligations successfully.

Two propositions can be true at the same time:

• no person should be convicted or publicly pronounced guilty without lawful proof; and
• the State failed when 14 citizens died in its operation, officials did not identify who commanded the firing, the inquiry report was withheld, a credible fresh investigation was stalled and final accountability remained unresolved for more than twelve years.

Confusing these propositions serves only one purpose: it converts the rights of accused persons into an excuse for the failures of investigators and institutions. Due process demands fairness to the accused and effectiveness for the victims. It does not require one to be sacrificed for the other.

Model Town failed the test of whether the State can investigate itself

Governments changed after 2014. Political alliances and office-holders changed. Yet the essential questions remained. That shows the failure is larger than one administration, although the conduct of the Punjab government in office at the time remains central to the inquiry and cannot be diluted by later political history.

The real rule-of-law test is not whether the State can prosecute a weak citizen. It is whether the State can investigate its own police, trace responsibility upward, preserve inconvenient evidence and allow a court to decide the case within a reasonable time.

Model Town provides a deeply unsatisfactory answer. Pakistan produced an inquiry, multiple investigations, two FIRs, a private complaint, revisions, larger benches, a fresh JIT and repeated hearings. Institutional activity was abundant. A final, credible determination of responsibility was not.

The State still owes the victims justice

The State's remaining duty is concrete, not ceremonial. Every pending proceeding must be decided without avoidable delay. The legality of the fresh JIT must receive a final determination. Any lawful investigation must be independent of persons or institutions whose conduct it examines. Existing evidence must be preserved, disclosed and tested. Responsibility must be followed through the operational chain rather than stopping automatically at subordinate officers.

The public also deserves accurate procedural transparency: the present stage of the private complaint, the number of surviving accused and witnesses, the status of the JIT litigation, and the orders that currently control further investigation should be available through official records rather than reconstructed from scattered news reports and party statements.

The Model Town victims were failed first by the lethal result of an operation carried out in the name of the State. They were failed again when the institutions responsible for finding the truth did not produce a prompt and final answer.

The Najafi Report did not authorise conviction by public opinion. It did something the government of the time could not reasonably ignore: it exposed grave inconsistencies, disproportionate force, deliberate silence and a command structure that would not identify who ordered the firing.

After twelve years, the absence of a final answer is no longer merely delay. It is a continuing denial of the State's constitutional responsibility to deliver justice.