Judge rebukes Khaleda, lawyers for late arrival

A special court judge came down heavily on the lawyers for BNP chief Khaleda Zia after her late arrival delayed yesterday’s hearing in the Zia Orphanage Trust case for nearly one-and-a-half hours. Court sources said the defence lawyers were supposed to start placing their closing argument in the graft case against Khaleda and five others around 10:30am. But the BNP chairperson reached the courtroom in the capital’s Bakshibazar area at 11:58am, leaving the court sitting idle for almost 90 minutes. Expressing his resentment over the matter, Judge Md Akhtaruzzaman of Dhaka Special Judge’s Court 5 told her lawyers that a court cannot run in such a way. “It is almost 12 noon. How does a court function this way?” the judge asked her lawyers soon after she appeared before the court. “I can come to court at 9:30am, so how come you cannot? The court will start the case proceedings at 10:30am from tomorrow (today),” he warned the defence counsels. Instead of accepting the court's rebuke however, Khaleda’s lawyers engaged in an altercation with the judge, with some of them alleging that he was running the court the way a court-martial operates. They said the judge was setting three hearing dates a week. Meanwhile, Advocate AJ Mohammad Ali, a lawyer for Khaleda, resumed his closing argument in the case and finished it before the lunch break. After the break, Barrister Jamiruddin Sircar started placing defence statement as the fourth lawyer for Khaleda. Earlier in the day, while the court was waiting for the hearing to start, one of her lawyers, Abdur Rezzak Khan urged it to verify whether Khaleda had opened a bank account in this regard, disbursed the money deposited in the trust fund and whether there were any anomalies in the donations made to the fund. Rezzak had previously placed his closing argument in this case in December. The Anti-Corruption Commission filed the case on July 3, 2008, accusing Khaleda, her son Tarique Rahman, and four others of embezzling more than Tk 2.1 crore through forming the trust. In addition, in 2011, the ACC accused the BNP chief and three others of misappropriating Tk3.15 crore from the Zia Charitable Trust Fund.