KARACHI: An anti-terrorism court acquitted on Wednesday two accused in a case pertaining to an attack on a passenger coach for want of evidence.

Naeemzada and Habibullah, said to be political activists, have been charged with killing two passengers and wounding eight others by opening indiscriminate fire on a coach in Metroville in July 2011.

The judge of the ATC-III, Saleem Raza Baloch, who conducted the trial inside the central prison, pronounced the judgement after recording evidence of witnesses and final arguments from both sides.

The court in its judgement observed that two eyewitnesses had not identified the accused before it and were declared hostile by the prosecution for deviating from their previous evidence while the other witnesses had also not directly deposed against the accused.

The police claimed to have recovered a crime weapon from Naeemzada, but there was nothing on the record to suggest that the weapon was found in his custody as a memo of the recovery was not produced in court, it added.

Discarding a contention of the prosecution about confession of the accused in the lock-up and arrest of the co-accused on the statement of Naeemzada, the court further ruled that any admission before the police and implication of an accused on the statement of the co-accused were not admissible before the court as evidence.

According to the prosecution, the accused along with their absconding accomplices attacked Mashallah Coach on July 7 in 2011, which left Noor Islam and Ijaz dead and eight other passengers wounded.

Both eyewitnesses, who were travelling in the bus and sustained wounds, had identified the accused before a judicial magistrate during their statement recorded under Section 164 (power to record statements and confessions) of the criminal procedure code.

However, they contended before the trial court that their statements were not recorded by a magistrate, but a reader took their signatures on the statements.

The prosecution had also submitted an application under Section 193 (punishment for false evidence) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) asking the court to initiate perjury proceedings against the witnesses for deposing falsely.

A case was registered under Sections 302 (premeditated murder), 324 (attempted murder), 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code read with Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 at the SITE-A police station.

Published in Dawn, September 18th, 2014