KARACHI: A sessions court on Tuesday sentenced filmmaker Jamshed Mahmood Raza, popularly known as Jami, to two years in prison for defaming fellow director Sohail Javed in 2019, Dawn.com reported.

He was taken into custody and moved to the Karachi central prison to serve his sentence, his lawyer has confirmed.

The court convicted him under Section 500 (defamation) of the Pakistan Penal Code and also imposed a fine of Rs10,000.

The case involved a letter Jami read out from an anonymous sexual assault survivor at the Lahooti Melo and also posted to his Facebook page.

The letter was from an unnamed survivor who described being assaulted by a very well-known figure in the entertainment industry but did not name the alleged abuser. Jami didn’t name the alleged abuser in his Facebook post either.

However, Javed argued that in the comment section of the post, many people guessed it was him and Jami did nothing to stop the speculation or deny the accusation.

Javed filed a defamation lawsuit against Jami, who denied the accusations and said the letter was handed to him by the organiser of the Lahooti Melo and he did not know the content at the time of reading it.

However, the court observed that Jami did not “produce the letter’s author, any communication with the Lahooti Melo organisers or any credible evidence to show that he was unaware of the content beforehand”.

Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2025