PESHAWAR, June 5: A two-member bench of the Peshawar High Court on Wednesday acquitted a victim of the inhuman custom of ‘Swara’ who was convicted for killing her husband.

The bench, comprising Justice Tariq Pervaiz and Justice Dost Muhammad Khan, accepted a criminal appeal of Ms Gul Marjan and set aside the sentence of life imprisonment awarded to her by the trial court.

The appellant was also a juvenile offender as she was not 18 at the time of commission of the crime.

Chairman ‘Voice of Prisoners’ Noor Alam Khan appeared for the appellant, and argued that she was falsely implicated in the case by her in-laws.

He stated that the victim had to suffer twice as first she was handed over to the rival group for settling a dispute and then she was implicated in the murder case of her husband.

The lady, Gul Marjan, has been in prison since 1998 when she was arrested by the police on charges of killing her husband.

The woman was charged with the murder of her husband, Zahir Shah, by her father-in-law, Eid Bacha.

He claimed that Gul Marjan was given in Swara to his son and since their marriage their relations were strained.

The appellant was handed over against her will to the rival party by her family members in 1997. A jirga in Banda Speenkai in Kohat had decided to hand her over to the rival group in Swara so as to settle a dispute which had arisen due to illicit relations of her brother with a girl of the rival family.

The deceased Zahir Shah was killed on Dec 3, 1998. The FIR of the case was registered by the appellant herself. She told the police that she was in her room with her husband at midnight when he went out to the toilet. She claimed that she heard a gun shot and saw her husband lying injured outside her room.

One week after the occurrence, her father-in-law charged her with the offence, stating that the brother of the woman, Wazir Badshah, had illicit relations with his daughter. He claimed that a local jirga decided to hand them Gul Marjan in Swara, and also fined her brother Rs10,000. From the very beginning, he claimed, the relations between the couple were strained.

She was tried by the additional district and sessions judge and was convicted on the basis of her confessional statement.

In her confessional statement she claimed that from the very first day when she was given in Swara her husband used to torture her and severely beat her on different pretexts.

Later on, she retracted that statement and claimed that she was forced by the police to record that statement.

Noor Alam Khan argued that it was a case of no evidence and even the weapon of offence was not recovered from the residence of the appellant.

He added that the confessional statement could not be relied upon as it was recorded under duress and she was tortured by the police for recording it.