MARDAN: Imran Ali — the prime suspect in the lynching of Mashal Khan and who allegedly shot the latter on the campus of Abdul Wali Khan University here — has confessed to his crime but said that he did not repent his act.

Police presented Imran before a senior civil judge for Mardan, Arbab Sohail, on Saturday. Judicial Magistrate Mohib-ur-Rehman was also present in the court.

In his confessional statement, the suspect said he was a classmate of the deceased as he knew him from 2014 onwards.

Initially he had good relations with Mashal, he said, but soon severed ties with him owing to his “secular thought and un-Islamic beliefs and ideas”.

Statement of Imran Ali recorded in court

“Sometimes it felt as if he [Mashal] was committing blasphemy,” Imran remarked.

Even though he had severed ties with Mashal he continued to get information about the victim’s alleged acts of blasphemy, said Imran.

He said that when he arrived on the campus on the day of the lynching he saw that an enraged mob, including students, university staff and even outsiders, was raising slogans and calling for Mashal’s execution for his alleged acts of blasphemy.

“I went straight to my hostel room and took my pistol from there and went after Mashal,” said Imran. The victim was trying to flee the scene while the mob was chasing him.

“When I reached the Hostel No 1, I opened fire on Mashal Khan... when I got the opportunity and resultantly he fell to the ground due to bullet injuries.”

In his statement, the accused said that after shooting Mashal he fled the scene and never looked back to see what happened there afterwards.

Imran told the court that it was not just Mashal who was responsible for the unsavoury and deadly incident. The university administration was equally responsible as it did not take timely actions to resolve the matter.

He and others like him had protested time and again to the administration over Mashal’s “acts of blasphemy” but to no avail, said the suspect.

He was of the view that incompetent and inefficient officials had been inducted into the administration who were simply unable to properly run the university.

Imran said he was not ashamed of his act because he “did not shoot Mashal but a blasphemer”.

The suspect, who hails from Malakand Division, got his statement recorded in the court two days after the deputy inspector general (DIG) of Mardan police, Mohammad Alam Shinwari, announced his arrest at a press conference.

On the occasion, DIG Shinwari had told media that Imran had confessed to have shot Mashal during interrogation and that the pistol used in the crime had been recovered.

Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2017