KARACHI, March 19: The additional district and sessions judge, central, Soofia Latif, on Wednesday reserved her judgment on an acquittal plea of Pakistan People’s Party co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari from Justice Nizam murder case till March 24 after recording final arguments from both sides.

The defence counsel, Shahadat Awan, had moved the application under Section 249-A of the Criminal Procedure Code (power of a magistrate to acquit the accused at any stage) for the cancellation of charges against his client.

The counsel said it was an exemplary criminal case in which five charge-sheets were filed by the investigation agencies in four years with addition of dishonest improvements in each report every time. He argued that two sets of accused were charge-sheeted in the case at different times.

He further said that the so-called confessional statements of Babar Sindhu and Akhtar Javed Pirzada were obtained under duress. As mentioned in their written application, Mr Sindhu and Mr Pirzada disclosed that they were tortured and their signatures were obtained on a blank paper. They prayed for exclusion of such statements from the investigation.

The defence counsel pointed out that no notice under Section 265-C of the CrPC was served on his client Asif Ali Zardari and any statement recorded in his absence could not be used against him. He said that the so-called statements could not be termed the statements of approvers as the consent of legal heirs of the deceased was not obtained for declaring them approvers, which was the legal requirement.

Mr Awan argued that the then government and its agencies had falsely implicated Mr Zardari in the murder case of a former judge and a lawyer in order to turn the bench and bar against him. He said his client failed to get speedy justice. He even could not be indicted in the case despite the passage of over 12 years, the counsel concluded, pleading to acquit Mr Zardari from the case.

Special Public Prosecutor Niamat Ali Randhawa represented the state in the case. But he did not oppose the acquittal application. The court reserved its order for pronouncement on the next date of hearing.

Asif Ali Zardari, Akhtar Javed Pirzada, Bilal Shaikh and Babar Sindhu are facing double murder charges. Justice Nizam Ahmed of the Sindh High Court and his son Nadeem Ahmed, a lawyer, were shot dead on June 10, 1996, in front of their PECHS residence.

The complainant, retired Group Captain Sikandar, who was a brother-in-law of the justice, had lodged an FIR (357/1996) at the Ferozabad police station under Section 302/34 of the Pakistan Penal Code.

The killings were attributed to a dispute over a prized plot near Awami Markaz as Justice Nizam Ahmed had opposed its commercialisation and illegal allotment.