Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif have had their bans for doping overturned, the chairman of an appeals committee said on Tuesday.
Updated at 5.18 pm
KARACHI: Pakistan fast bowlers Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif have been cleared of doping and had their bans for the offence overturned, the chairman of an appeals committee said on Tuesday.
Neither player was advised on taking vitamin supplements which may have led to them testing positive for the banned steroid nandrolone, committee chairman Fakhruddin Ibrahim said in Karachi.
"This appeal committee therefore holds that Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif will not be deemed to have committed a doping offence," said Ibrahim, a retired judge.
"The ban and punishment imposed by the earlier tribunal is hereby set aside as being contrary to the provision of laws."
A tribunal banned Akhtar, 31, for two years in October for doping while Asif, 23, received a one-year ban for the same alleged offence. The new ball pairing had denied taking any illegal substances.
The three-member appeals committee made its decision by a 2-1 majority, Ibrahim said. The other members of the committee are former Test cricketer Haseeb Ahsan and doping expert Dr. Danish Zaheer.
Ibrahim said the committee found it was clearly, plainly evident that neither Shoaib Akhtar nor Mohammad Asif were ever warned or cautioned against taking supplements. Asif was only told to discontinue taking the supplements when he himself told team physio Darryn Lifson about them in August 2006, he said.
Neither player was even provided with any international or local publication warning them against the use supplements, the committee found.
It was the committee's view that Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif have established that they had an honest and reasonable belief that the supplements ingested by them did not contain any prohibited substances.
They were cleared under a law on exceptional circumstances in the Pakistan Cricket Board's laws.
At the time the bans were imposed the International Cricket Council had praised the Pakistan Cricket Board and the initial drugs tribunal for their handling of the case and for imposing the penalties.
Akhtar and Asif have not been included in the squad for the second one-dayer against the West Indies, despite being cleared of doping offences.
Chief selector Wasim Bari said the same squad that had been named for the first game, abandoned due to torrential rain, had been retained.
''As far as Shoaib and Asif are concerned, we don't know the details as yet from the cricket board about the lifting of their bans,'' he said.
''I will have to talk to the other selectors before we decide on when to consider them for selection.''
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