KARACHI: A high court here has suspended the proceedings of a plea seeking a transparent probe into the Pakistani plane crash last week till June 25 after the findings of the ongoing inquiry into the accident are released, according to a media report on Saturday.
The Airbus A320 aircraft of the national carrier Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) had 91 passengers and a crew of eight when it crashed into the Jinnah Garden area near Model Colony in Malir on Friday, minutes before its landing.
Ninety Seven passengers were killed.
Eleven people on the ground were injured.
The federal government has constituted an investigation team, headed by Air Commodore Muhammad Usman Ghani, President of the Aircraft Accident and Investigation Board, to probe the accident.
An 11-member team of foreign experts from an Airbus aerospace facility in France also visited Karachi earlier this week to conduct an independent probe into the incident.
The two-member bench of the Sindh High Court comprising Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar and Justice Yousuf Ali Sayeed passed the order after the deputy attorney general told the court that the report into the plane crash was likely to be released by June 22 and it would be made public.
The court said that the issue could not be discussed further until the inquiry report was released and adjourned the hearing till June 25.
“Prime Minister Khan is personally overseeing the inquiry of the Model Colony crash. How then can the court issue a notice to relevant government departments and officials until the inquiry’s findings are not released?” Justice Mazhar said.
According to the plea, the procurement and employment of “out of order” aircraft by the national carrier Pakistan International Airlines puts around 800 lives at risk daily, The Express Tribune reported.
Seeking an independent inquiry into the plane crash, the plea stated that the investigation report of the 2016 plane crash in Havelian has also not been released yet.
A total of 48 people were killed when a PIA plane crashed in a village near Havelian while en route to Islamabad from Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.