The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government on Wednesday moved the Peshawar High Court (PHC) against the Mashal Khan verdict, challenging the acquittal of 26 people in the case.

An Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) in Haripur had announced its verdict in the lynching case on February 7, handing one person two death sentences, five persons multiple terms of life imprisonment, and 25 others jail sentences, and acquitting 26 others for want of sufficient evidence.

Mashal Khan, 23, a student of Mass Communications at Mardan's Abdul Wali Khan University, was beaten and shot to death by an angry mob on April 13, 2017, after he was accused of blasphemy.

Of the total 61 suspected of involvement in the lynching ─ the majority of them were students and university employees and a tehsil councillor belonging to the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) ─ charged in the first information report, 57 had been arrested within a few days of the incident. A 58th suspect who was arrested in Jan 2018 has yet to be charged.

KP Advocate General (AG) Latif Yoisafzai filed three separate appeals in the court. One of the petitions pleaded the court to set aside the acquittal of the 26 people in the case; the second one pleaded the court against the acquittal of 31 people, including the prime convict, against certain charges; while the third petition asks the court to increase the sentence of 31 convicts who had been given three years in prison.

The petition argued that the trial court had "committed a grave error and illegality by acquitting" the 26 people despite what it called a "plethora of evidence produced against them by the prosecution". The plea further argued that the acquittal was not maintainable in the eyes of the law and is liable to be set aside.

Earlier on February 14, the acquittal of 26 persons in Mashal Khan’s lynching case by an ATC was challenged in the PHC by Mashal’s brother Aimal Iqbal Khan. He had requested the court to set aside their acquittal and award them the death penalty.

Aimal Khan had filed an appeal with the court saying the trial court miserably failed to appreciate the ocular and circumstantial evidence in respect of the acquittal of the 26 accused persons.

Meanwhile, the man who shot Mashal Khan and 12 others given various jail terms for participating in his lynching also challenged their convictions in the high court.

Syed Akhtar, the counsel for the 13 convicts, filed an appeal against the death sentence handed to Ali and the jail terms awarded to five others in the Abbottabad Circuit Bench of the PHC.

Akhtar had told DawnNews that a total of 13 appeals have been filed against the convictions announced by the ATC over the course of a week.

The counsel pointed out what he termed contradictions in the detailed judgment, and urged the high court to release his clients after setting aside the ATC verdict. “The verdict is not accordance with the law as no witness appeared in the trial court to testify that Imran Ali had opened fire on Mashal Khan,” Akhtar said. He also claimed there was no proof or video evidence to show that Imran was present at the time of Mashal's killing.