• Judge grants Christian man benefit of doubt, citing unreliable testimony, missing evidence and unverified digital evidence
• Key witnesses unable to identify accused during trial; secondary eyewitness not produced
LAHORE: A sessions court on Monday acquitted a Christian man accused of desecrating the Holy Quran, ruling that the prosecution had completely failed to establish any direct connection between the accused and the alleged act.
An additional district and sessions judge announced the verdict after concluding that the prosecution’s case had been severely compromised by unreliable witness testimony, missing evidence and unverified digital proof.
The judge granted the benefit of doubt to the accused as a matter of right and ordered his immediate release.
Shadman police had registered
FIR No. 701 on April 27, 2024, under Sections 295-A and 295-B of the Pakistan Penal Code.
The complainant, Mobeen Ilyas, claimed that he had witnessed a person standing next to an auto-rickshaw allegedly desecrating pages of the Holy Quran near Shadman Chowk.
The police arrived at the scene and nominated the Christian man in the case.
The formal trial commenced on Jan 16, 2025, during which the suspect pleaded not guilty, maintained his complete innocence and even denied being present at the crime scene.
Failure of witnesses
In his 10-page judgment, the judge observed that the prosecution’s case fell apart primarily because its principal witnesses failed to legally connect the accused to the crime scene.
He noted that the complainant, while deposing on oath, narrated the incident in court but completely failed to identify the accused as the individual he supposedly saw desecrating the pages at the scene.
He added that cross-examination revealed that the complainant had not even drafted the application himself.
Another key private witness, who testified to seeing a crowd apprehend one person, also failed to identify the accused in open court as the same individual.
The judge further noted that the prosecution had decided not to produce a secondary eyewitness, a security guard who allegedly helped apprehend the culprit at the scene.
He ruled that withholding such vital independent witnesses deprived the case of natural corroboration.
The prosecution had relied heavily on a CD containing CCTV footage obtained from the Punjab Safe Cities Authority to prove the occurrence.
However, the judge found the digital evidence to be legally useless.
He noted that the prosecution had neither played the video in court, nor consulted a forensic expert or a Safe Cities official to verify its authenticity, and also failed to send it to a laboratory to rule out tampering.
Citing Supreme Court precedents, the judge ruled that the mere recovery of a CD did not amount to proof of its contents.
He noted that the police had claimed that the rickshaw found at the scene belonged to the accused, but the investigating officer admitted that he had failed to produce or verify any official vehicle registration or ownership documents linking it to the accused.
Furthermore, the judge observed, a forensic report by the Punjab Forensic Science Agency only confirmed that the torn pages came from the same source but provided no forensic evidence linking the physical handling of those pages to the accused.
The judge maintained that while the court was deeply mindful of the immense sanctity attached to the Holy Quran, the gravity of an accusation could not override the legal standard of proof.
Citing SC rulings, he reiterated that even a single circumstance creating reasonable doubt entitled an accused to an acquittal as a matter of right, not as a concession.
“In the present case, the doubts are not imaginary, artificial or far-fetched. They arise from the prosecution evidence itself,” the judge observed.
He acquitted the Christian man of all blasphemy charges and directed that the case property, the sacred pages of the Holy Quran recovered from the scene, be handled and disposed of with strict legal reverence.
Published in Dawn, July 7th, 2026