PESHAWAR: A junior lawyer arrested on a charge of facilitating the murder of a blasphemy suspect inside a courtroom by providing a gun to the killer was remanded in police custody on Wednesday.

Amid tight security, suspect Tufail Zia was produced before an anti-terrorism court, which granted his custody to the police for three days with the directive to produce him again before the court on Aug 22.

Official sources told Dawn that the suspect, Tufail Zia, confessed before police interrogators that he had taken the gun to the Peshawar Judicial Complex, where the under-trial blasphemy suspect Tahir Ahmad Naseem, a US national, was shot dead inside the courtroom by the prime suspect, who is a teenager.

Zia was the counsel for blasphemy case complainant Malik Owais, a Now­shera resident studying in an Islamabad seminary, in the trial against the late Naseem.

The police officials who produced suspect Zia before the ATC requested the presiding officer to grant his physical custody, as they needed to interrogate him about the possibility of involvement of other persons in the commission of the crime.

They said that during initial investigation the suspect confessed that he had taken the gun to the Judicial Complex, which was handed over to the prime suspect for killing the blasphemy suspect.

The killer, who was apprehended soon after the shooting inside the courtroom on July 29, has been kept at Peshawar Central Prison on judicial remand.

The FIR of the murder was registered at East Cantt police station under Section 302 of Pakistan Penal Code, Section 7 of Anti-Terrorism Act and Section 15 of Arms Act.

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2020