LAHORE: The Lahore High Court has allowed an appeal of a man against his conviction for raping a schoolteacher in Shorkot.

A trial court in 2018 awarded 14-year imprisonment to Amjad Ali under section 376 (i) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC). The convict challenged his sentence in the high court.

Allowing the appeal, Justice Muhammad Amjad Rafiq observed that the complainant was not an eyewitness of the occurrence who reported the matter to the police with an unexplainable delay of five days.

The judge noted that the prosecution also implicated a woman, the owner of the one-room house allegedly used for the crime, as an accused in the case, but she was later acquitted of the charges.

He said it was a setback for the prosecution that proof for involvement of co-accused Shamim Bibi was not available to knit the story complete, and the place of occurrence was also disputed because acclaimed eyewitnesses could not describe it clearly.

The judge observed that the prosecution story with respect to the commission of rape with the victim fell to the ground, because medical examination of the victim after five days showed ‘old healed rupture of hymen’ which was not possible during that period.

Moreover, he said, the investigating officer conceded during cross-examination that a forensic report was received with an opinion that no seminal material was found on the vaginal swabs.

Therefore, no support to prosecution story was available in the form of medical evidence, the judge maintained and set aside the sentence of the appellant.

Published in Dawn, May 4th, 2024