LAHORE: The Lahore High Court on Wednesday acquitted three men, sentenced to life imprisonment in one of the cases registered in connection with the Kasur child-abuse scandal, which shocked the country in 2015.

The bench comprising Justice Shehram Sarwar Chaudhry and Justice Ali Zia Bajwa allowed the appeals of Haseem Amir, Aleem Asif and Waseem Abid in FIR No. 219/2015.

The three men, accused by police and prosecutors of abducting and sexually assaulting around 280 children in the village of Hussain Khanwala in Kasur, had been sentenced by an anti-terrorism court in 2018.

The men had been named in multiple FIRs registered by Ganda Singhwala police, but were later acquitted in a number of cases back in 2017 and 2018 after being given the benefit of doubt.

However, the appellants will not be able to come out of the jail immediately due to their conviction in other FIRs as well.

On Wednesday, Advocate Abid Khitchi, who represented the convicts, told reporters that the written order on the appeals had not been issued so far.

He argued before the bench that a forensic audit of the videos failed to identify the appellants serving sentences in jail.

Furthermore, he argued that some provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997, were not applicable to the charges against the convicts and medical reports did not corroborate the evidence presented by the prosecution.

Kasur police had registered at least 29 FIRs against dozens of suspects on charges of abducting and sexually assaulting 280 children and filming the incidents to blackmail their victims.

Some of the incidents of sexual abuse dated back to 2009, and it was claimed at the time that the accused had been blackmailing their victims by using their videos.

The police had conspicuously failed to act despite pleas from some parents, eventually making dozens of arrests after clashes between relatives and authorities over a property dispute brought the issue into the media spotlight.

At the time, the suspects’ counsel had argued that police implicated them in the cases on government pressure.

Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2023