KARACHI, Dec 29: A teenager was sentenced to death by an anti-terrorism court on Thursday for raping and killing a minor girl.

The court found Sher Khan guilty of abducting his five-year-old cousin in July 2010 within the remit of the Clifton police station and subjecting her to a sexual assault before strangling her to death.

Judge Syed Hasan Shah Bukhari of the ATC-I, who conducted the trial and reserved the verdict after recording the evidence of witnesses and final arguments, read out the conviction order in an open court on Thursday.

The court handed down death sentence to the accused on two counts for the offences he committed under Sections 364-A (kidnapping a person under the age of 10) and 302 (punishment for qatl-i-amd) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC).

The accused was also sentenced to life imprisonment (25 years) under Section 376 of the PPC for committing rape.

The court imposed a fine of Rs200,000 and ordered that half of the fine be paid to the bereaved family as required under Section 544-A of the criminal procedure code. In case of non-payment, the convict would have to undergo an additional one-year imprisonment.

“He should be hanged by neck till he is dead. The death sentence is subject to the confirmation of high court of Sindh, Karachi,” the court ruled.

According to the verdict, all the evidence that came up on record clearly corroborated the confession of the accused in all material details and the pieces of evidence collected by the investigating agency have collectively and individually corroborated the retracted confessional statement of the accused made before a judicial magistrate.

The judgment says that the evidence of the judicial magistrate has proved that the confession of the accused was recorded in a legal manner and after due observance of legal formalities. It further states that there is nothing on record to draw any adverse inference from the evidence of witnesses while a witness also saw the victim alive in the company of the accused before her death. Besides, it added, the body was recovered on a lead given by the accused.

“The medical evidence has suggested that she was subjected to sexual intercourse and was then strangulated to death. All these circumstances tend to prove the voluntariness of the confession, although it was retracted by the accused,” it stated.

The court ruled that the kidnapping of the minor girl, subjecting her to a sexual assault, intentionally causing her death and disposing of her body were the acts of terrorism which created a sense of fear, terror and insecurity in the minds of family members of the victim as well as area residents.

It stated that the contention of defence lawyer that there was no direct evidence of any offence committed by the accused was of no consequence, because the case was made up of circumstantial evidence that fully corroborated the retraced confession.

The court observed that the defence lawyer also argued that the delay of eight days in recording the confession was made to force and pressurise the accused to make such a statement. However, it had no legal weight since there was no proof of any such pressure, it ruled.

The prosecution proved its charges against the accused beyond a shadow of a doubt, the verdict concluded.

Earlier, Special Public Prosecutor Mohammad Khan Buriro argued that the accused was seen with the victim just before the incident by a prosecution witness while the body, as well as the rope used in the crime, was also recovered on a lead given by the accused.

He said that the accused voluntarily recorded his confessional statement before a judicial magistrate and all the witnesses had testified against the accused and the medical reports also corroborated their evidence.

In his final arguments, defence lawyer Nasir Mehmood submitted that the complainant falsely implicated the accused in the case in order to deprive him of property. He added that the accused was an orphan and a close relative of the complainant and they were sharing the accommodation, which was their joint property.

He also argued that the samples were sent for a DNA test, but the report was not submitted in court.

According to the prosecution, the accused took the five-year-old girl to the rooftop of their house on July 17, subjected her to a rape, strangled her to death and dumped the body in a football ground being used as a garbage dump in the Upper Gizri area.

The police took the accused into custody on July 19 and during initial interrogation, he confessed to his crime, the prosecution added.

A case (FIR 184/2010) was registered under Sections 302, 364-A and 376 of the PPC read with Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 on a complaint of the victim’s grandfather at the Clifton police station.

The accused was brought from prison on Thursday morning and produced in court. He showed no emotion when the judgment was read out.