Plea in Supreme Court of Pakistan for extradition of Raymond Davis

A former senator and ruling party leader Zafar Ali Shah has asked the Supreme Court to order the immediate extradition of Raymond Davis — a contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — and asked that he be tried for the murder of Pakistanis under local penal laws.

CIA contractor Raymond Davis, former president Asif Ali Zardari, former prime minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, former army chief retired Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, former Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Director General retired Gen Shuja Pasha, the controller general of military accounts, former ambassador to US Husain Haqqani, former US ambassador Cameron Munter and the federal government have been named as respondents in the petition.

In his book, Contractor: How I Landed in a Pakistani Prison and Ignited a Diplomatic Crisis, Davis acknowledged that he was a contractor with the CIA and that he killed two men in Lahore on Jan 27, 2011. A car coming to his rescue also killed a third man, Ibadur Rahman, while speeding down the wrong side of the road.

On March 16, 2011, Davis was released after the families of the killed men were paid $2.4 million in blood money. After his acquittal of all charges, Davis returned to the US.

The petition has asked the court to summon the complete case record from the antiterrorism court which eventually released Davis.

In his book The Contractor: How I Landed in a Pakistani Prison and Ignited a Diplomatic Crisis, Davis recalls that Gen Pasha was also “responsible for replacing” the original prosecutor, Asad Manzoor Butt, who was working pro bono at the behest of Jamaat-i-Islami with Raja Irshad, “who was more beholden to ISI than any religious group”.

Davis explains that the plan to rescue him by paying blood money hinged on the acquiescence of the 18 family members of his victims and “ISI agents applied as much pressure as needed to get them to accept the diyat”.

With the support of the first prosecutor, several relatives resisted the plan. One of them was Waseem Shamshad, Muhammad Faheem Shamshad’s brother, who “did not come on-board for weeks”.

Another dissenter was Mashhod-ur-Rehman, a UK-educated lawyer, whose brother had been killed by the SUV that came to rescue Davis.

“To separate the family members from the radical Islamists whispering in their ears and the lawyer who endorsed a hard-line Islamic agenda, ISI operatives intervened on March 14, 2011, detaining and sequestering all 18 of them,” Davis writes in the book published this week.