PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court has upheld the conviction of a man by the trial court for killing his newlywed wife in Mardan district around four years ago.
A bench consisting of Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim and Justice Sahibzada Asadullah rejected the appeal of Lateefur Rehman against his conviction and life sentence declaring the prosecution has proved its case against the appellant.
The FIR of the murder was registered on Sept 7, 2019, at the Katlang police station in Mardan. The complainant, who was an uncle of the deceased, Akhtar Nawab, told the police in the hospital where the body was taken that the marriage of his niece, Maria, with Lateefur Rehman was solemnised three months ago.
He claimed that he was present in his house when he learned about the murder of his niece, so he rushed to that place and found the body on the roof of the house.
The complainant claimed that he was informed at the place of the murder that the woman was killed by her husband.
About the motive behind the murder, the complainant said the couple went through rough patches as the husband was asking the deceased to go out and fetch firewood from the forest, whereas she was reluctant to perform that task.
An additional sessions judge convicted the appellant on Jan 24, 2022, sentenced him to life imprisonment and ordered him to pay Rs100,000 compensation to parents of the deceased. The appellant claimed that the woman had died by suicide.
Additional advocate general Jalaluddin Akbar Gara appeared for state in the case, whereas the complainant was represented by lawyer Yousaf Shah Mohmand.
The bench ruled: “The appellant, soon after the incident, went into hiding till his arrest and he could not explain that why he left the place of the occurrence and that why he did not shift the body of the deceased to the hospital and did not report the matter.”
“The conduct displayed by the appellant is a circumstance, which invites the attention of this court regarding his guilty conscience, when his conduct is juxtaposed with the collected evidence, no other inference can be drawn but the one that the appellant has a hand in the affair,” it declared.
Published in Dawn, December 9th, 2023