SHC frees child murder case convicts due to defective probe

The Sindh High Court (SHC) on Wednesday set aside the conviction of three persons in the kidnapping and killing case of a child due to a lack of evidence and defective investigation.

Mohammad Irfan, Abdul Hafeez and Allah Ditta had been sentenced to life imprisonment by an anti-terrorism court for abducting, sexually assaulting and murdering a nine-year-old boy in the Ittehad Town area.

According to the prosecution, after kidnapping the boy on September 20, 2017, the appellants had demanded Rs1.5 million as ransom for his release, but they later subjected him to sexual assault and then killed him.

The appellants’ counsel said that no direct evidence had been produced by the prosecution to prove the case against them. The counsel said that the DNA report did not implicate the appellants, and no evidence had been placed by the prosecution with regard to the ransom.

The additional prosecutor general backed the trial court’s judgment, and said that the trial court’s judgment did not suffer from any infirmity or illegality. He said that sufficient circumstantial evidences were available to connect the appellants with the offence, while two of the appellants, Allah Ditta and Abdul Hafeez, had voluntarily led the police to the place of abduction and murder of the boy, so their appeals should be dismissed.

After hearing the arguments of the counsel and perusing the evidences, an SHC division bench comprising Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha and Justice Khadim Hussain Tunio said that it was a matter of record that the incident was not witnessed by anyone.

The court said that the identification alone of the appellants by the complainant that the appellants had been living in his neighbourhood proved nothing besides the fact that they were neighbours.

The bench said that it was incumbent upon the prosecution to do its best in proving an unbroken chain of events that would act as circumstantial evidence to establish the guilt of the appellants. The court said that the prosecution had unfortunately failed to prove its case, so the innocent boy’s death was in vain.

The bench said that the investigating officer had failed miserably at probing the case properly by involving all the possible parties, such as the owners of the mobile phones, or even getting the DNA samples of the appellants, despite knowing that an unnatural offence had been committed.

The court said that the prosecution had failed to prove the guilt of the appellants beyond any reasonable doubt, and resultantly, their conviction and the sentence awarded to them by the trial court were set aside. The bench ordered releasing the appellants if not required in other cases.