KARACHI: The Sindh High Court on Monday upheld a death sentence awarded to three men by the trial court and set aside the life terms of three others in the Allama Hasan Turabi murder case.

An antiterrorism court had handed down death sentence to Mohammad Amin, alias Khalid Shaheen, Sultan Mahmood, alias Saifullah, and Mohammad Rehman and awarded life imprisonment to Mohammad Akbar Khan, Ashfaq Qureshi and Raheemullah alias Ali Hasan in September 2010 for masterminding a suicide attack on the leader of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal in July 2006 that left him and a nephew of his dead and also planting a remote-controlled bomb earlier to kill him.

The trial court had also handed down multiple sentences of imprisonment to all the six convicts in connected offences.

The convicts through their lawyers filed appeals against the convictions before the SHC and after hearing both sides and examining the record and proceedings, the two-judge bench headed by Justice K.K. Agha dismissed the appeals of Amin, Sultan and Rehman and upheld the death penalty while the appeals of the other three appellants were allowed and their convictions were set aside.

The bench in its judgement ruled that all the three appellants, who were sentenced to death by the trial court, recorded their judicial confessions and many eyewitnesses deposed about their presence at the crime scene, when the bombing took place, in order to establish their criminal conspiracy.

Referring to the contentions of the lawyers for appellants that the identification parade was defective since there were procedural errors, the bench observed that it had not discarded the identification parade completely, but gave it lesser weight.

The bench ruled that the case against the three appellants stood proved beyond a reasonable doubt, adding that the case of the remaining three appellants was on a different footing.

It further said that as per the case of prosecution, Amin, Sultan and Rehman in their confessional statements named the other three as their accomplices, but it failed to provide corroborating evidence as required under the law to establish their link.

According to the prosecution, the Sindh chief of the Tehreek-i-Islami and provincial vice president of the of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal Allama Hasan Turabi and his nephew Ali Imran Turabi were killed when a suicide bomber posing as a beggar blew himself up outside the religious leader’s Gulshan-i-Iqbal residence on July 14, 2006 when they were returning home after attending an anti-Israel demonstration organised by the MMA.

The alleged suicide bomber was later identified as Abdul Karim Bengali. Three policemen and a woman were wounded in the blast.

Published in Dawn, December 17th, 2019