KARACHI: The Sindh High Court on Wednesday set aside the life imprisonment of three alleged Lyari gangsters in a case pertaining to the murder of five persons.

An antiterrorism court had sentenced Arif alias Mama, Asif alias Lamba and Sultan alias Jabal, said to be associated with one of the several criminal gangs operating in Lyari, to life in prison in August last year for killing Ismail, his brother Javed, their maternal uncle Taj Mohammed and their cousins Shoaib and Faisal in March 2014 outside their house in Mowachh Goth.

The convicts, through their counsel, filed appeals against the conviction order and after hearing both sides and examining the record and proceedings of the case, a two-judge bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha allowed the appeals and exonerated the appellants.

The bench in its judgement said that since the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt the benefit of the doubt was being extended to the appellants.

It also noted that key prosecution witness Asif Raza, who was also related to the victims, took three years to come up as an eyewitness to testify against the appellants, claiming that he kept quiet during such period as the Lyari gang warfare was at its peak and he was afraid.

However, the bench observed that the witness was not an ordinary citizen as he was severing in Pakistan Navy and his other relatives were also worked with the armed forces and he must not have had any reason to be afraid of gangsters in Lyari.

He was also not named as an eyewitness in the FIR while there was no evidence that he even told the same to Rangers who had shifted him and his relatives from the crime scene on the night of the incident to the headquarters of the paramilitary force, it added.

“We find it simply inexplicable that a son would keep mum over the murder of his father and other relatives which he allegedly saw for over three years especially as he had the support of his institution,” the bench observed.

About the identification parade of the appellants, the verdict stated that the eyewitness claimed that he knew the accused before the incident and the parade was not necessary if he already knew the accused.

The SHC further observed that the second eyewitness, Saddam Hussain, was Raza’s brother, was also not named as an eyewitness in the FIR, but unlike his brother he conceded in the cross-examination before the trial court that he did not see the accused killing his father.

The bench said that it could not safely rely on the evidence of the eyewitnesses as they could easily have cooked up the evidence around three years after the event in collusion with the complainant, who was also a relative of the victims and had enmity with the accused.

“That the defence case was consistent throughout i.e. the accused had been fixed by the complainant because he did not want to return the money to one of the accused for failing to get his job in the army as a sportsman. Significantly the complainant was in the army as a sportsman and might have been able to make such an arrangement or convince the accused that he could. As such the defence case cannot be simply discarded,” it added.

The prosecution said that the accused persons were gangsters of Lyari and they along with absconding accomplices had attacked the house of the victims on the night between March 9 and March 10, 2014 and shot dead five persons.

A case was registered on the complainant of Munir Ahmed, brother of two victims and an employee of Pakistan Navy, at the Mochko police station against Arif, Asif, Sultan and others.

Published in Dawn, September 28th, 2023