SHC dismisses appeals of girl’s murderers

The Sindh High Court (SHC) dismissed on Saturday appeals by a death row convict and another man who kidnapped and murdered a girl around 10 years about, observing that the prosecution had proved its case against them.

Mohammad Ayub was sentenced to death and his accomplice Mohammad Ahsan was handed down life imprisonment by an anti-terrorism court, having found them guilty of the murder of 12-year-old Kulsoom in the Mochko area.

According to the prosecution,

Ayub, who a tutor of the girl, kidnapped her from her residence on December 21, 2008, and demanded Rs300,000

in ransom from her father for her release.

The prosecution said that the defendants killed the girl on December 23 after the father failed to pay the ransom and dumped her body in a water tank of a local councilor’s house undergoing construction in Orangi Town.

The prosecution alleged that the defendants kept demanding ransom money from the father after her death and were arrested by police when they were scheduled to collect the amount. The body of the girl was recovered from the water tank after the arrests of the culprits.

A division bench headed by Justice Aftab Ahmed Gorar, after hearing the arguments and going over the evidence of the case, observed that there were no mitigating circumstances warranting lighter punishments for the convicts.

The court observed that crime rates in the society have reached ab alarming high and mental propensity towards the commission of crime with impunity is increasing.

Sparing the convict a death sentence would be a miscarriage of justice and, in order to restore its supremacy, the death sentence should be imposed on culprits when a case is proved against them, it added.

The court dismissed the appeals of both convicts, stating that they did not deserve any leniency.

Convictions set aside

The SHC set aside the convictions of two persons in a sectarian killing case. Maulvi Inayatullah and Mohammad Zakaria had been given the death sentences by an additional district and sessions judge of District East on June 30, 2016 for murdering Syed Amir Hussain Shah Shirazi in Shah Latif Town.

According to the prosecution, the appellants had killed Shah, a prayer leader at a mosque, on January 4, 2010, on a sectarian basis.

The court, after hearing the arguments of the counsel, observed that the prosecution had failed to prove its case and, for reasons to be recorded later on, set aside the convictions of the appellants. The court also ordered their release if they were not required in any other cases.