KARACHI, Aug 28: The prosecution in a kidnapping and murder case of a seven-year-old boy prayed on Saturday to an anti-terrorism court to award capital punishment to the accused on two counts.

Judge Arshad Noor Khan of the Anti-Terrorism Court No. 3 reserved the judgment till Sept 1 after hearing final arguments from the prosecution and defence attorneys.

Shafqat Hussain, hailing from Azad Kashmir, was charged with kidnapping Umair, son of a car dealer, for ransom and later killing him.

The accused was the watchman of Nadeem Arcade and he allegedly kidnapped Umair on April 10, at 5:30pm as he came downstairs from his second-floor apartment.

According to prosecution, the watchman took the boy to his room, hit him in his head with a club when the boy insisted to leave the room.

The boy died instantly and the watchman dumped the body in the room.

The accused contacted the family on phone and demanded Rs500,000 from victim's father, Mohammed Hanif, a car dealer, for Omair's release. The next night he disposed of the body in a nearby drain.

The alleged kidnapper kept on calling victim's family from different public call offices. He also called the car dealer twice at different places to deliver the ransom, though he himself never turned up.

Finally, he asked the victim's father to place the money under a wooden box lying inside the compound of Nadeem Arcade.

This led to his arrest on May 21 as the police found the box belonging to the watchman.

Special public prosecutor Naimat Ali Randhawa submitted that the prosecution had successfully proved its case beyond any shadow of doubt.

He contended that nobody knew what happened to the boy until the accused was arrested. The accused, he argued, himself led to the recovery of the body of the boy.

Besides, the prosecutor said, the accused first confessed to the crime in the presence of area people and the police. Following this extra-judicial confessional statement before the police, the accused volunteered his confessional statement before a judicial magistrate.

The prosecutor referred to the statement of the accused before the judicial magistrate to the effect that he was making a confessional statement as he could not sleep out of his guilt.

Mr Randhawa submitted that the postmortem report of the victim also corroborated with the disclosure of the accused about how he hit the boy.

The prosecutor contended that the circumstantial evidence, corroborated with his confessional statements, and the chain of facts proved the prosecution case against the accused.

He pleaded the court to sentence the accused to death on the two counts of kidnapping and murder.

Defence counsel Mansoorul Haq Solangi prayed the court to acquit his client as "he was innocent and implicated in the case by the police".

He argued that since his client hailed from a remote part of the country and had a few acquaintances in Karachi, the police implicated him in the case.