KARACHI, Jan 31: An anti-terrorism court on Saturday sentenced four men to life imprisonment for kidnapping a four-year-old boy for ransom.
The court found Syed Kamal Shah, Hazrat Syed, Mohammad Rawan Khan and Ali Mutiullah guilty of kidnapping Usman, son of Rozi Khan, in the Orangi area in February 2008 and demanding a ransom for his release.
The judge, Syed Hasan Shah Bukhari of ATC-I, who conducted the trial, pronounced the order after recording the evidence and final arguments from both sides.
The court also ordered confiscation of properties of the convicts to the extent of Rs200,000 each.
According to the judgment, the prosecution had proved its case against the accused beyond a shadow of a doubt as all points for the determination were interconnected and the evidence of witnesses was also similar. It added that the witness had rightly picked up the accused at the identification parade held in the court of a judicial magistrate and also identified them.
“The victim and the complainant have no motive to falsely implicate the accused in the case. Despite being subjected to lengthy cross-examination, no dent has been made in the testimony furnished by the complainant who has denied all suggestions put up by the defence counsel. It was established that after the abduction of the victim the accused demanded a ransom from his father while one of the accused Ali Mutiullah had also admitted in his Section 164 CrPC statement before a judicial magistrate regarding his guilt and the accused have shared a common objective to commit the crime,” the verdict said.
It added that the record did not show that the confessional statement of the accused was obtained through coercion and no adverse inference could be drawn against the complainant on the grounds of delay in lodging the FIR as it was fully explained by him and seemed plausible.
The court said it had considered the statements of the accused as well as the evidence of defence witnesses, but could not find it credible as no enmity between the parties had been proved and the defence witnesses failed to suggest false implication of the accused in the case.
It concluded that the accused had pleaded false implication due to enmity, but failed to prove it through documents and the mere words of the accused were not sufficient since they failed to disclose the nature of the enmity existing between them.
According to the prosecution, the accused with their absconding associate had kidnapped Usman, 4, on Feb 20, 2008 in Baloch Goth in the limits of the Orangi police station and demanded Rs5 million for his release. Later, the ransom amount was settled at Rs200,000 and on March 3, the accused had released the child after collecting the ransom money from his father, it added.
A team of the Anti-Violent Crime Cell (AVCC) had arrested Hazrat Syed and Kamal Shah on March 10, 2008 near the DDO (revenue) office in SITE and seized unlicensed weapons from them and later apprehended the other two accused on a lead given by the arrested accused.
A case (FIR 40/08) was registered against the accused under Section 365-A/34 of the Pakistan Penal Code read with Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act at the Orangi police station on the complaint of the victim’s father. Iqbal Syed is an absconding accused in the case.
In the final arguments, special public prosecutor Mohammad Khan Buriro submitted that the prosecution had provided sufficient evidence against the accused to prove their involvement in the case.
He said all witnesses had supported the prosecution case and fully implicated the accused in the commission of the crime by assigning their roles, adding that there were no material contradictions in the evidence of witnesses and minor nature of negations bound to occur in the present type of case might be overlooked.
He contended that that the statement of the judicial magistrate concerned also corroborated that the complainant had correctly picked and identified the accused during the identification parade and sought the maximum punishment for the accused.
The defence counsel argued that a false FIR was lodged by the complainant in connivance with police and it was a concocted story as even the section applied in the FIR was incorrect, which had been rectified later.
He submitted that according to the FIR, the incident took place on Feb 20 but the case was registered on Feb 24 and no explanation had been given in that regard.
The court also found accused Syed Kamal Shah, Hazrat Syed and Ali Mutiullah guilty of keeping illegal weapons and also sentenced them to two years each in prison with a fine of Rs5,000 each and in case of default the convicts would have to undergo an additional six-month imprisonment. The cases of illegal weapons were registered against the accused under Section 13-D of the Arms Ordinance at the Garden police station.
The accused were produced in custody before the court on Saturday and were remanded back to the Central Prison with conviction orders to serve out the awarded sentences.
The court said both sentences would run concurrently and the benefit of Section 382-B (period of detention to be considered while awarding sentence of imprisonment) of the CrPC was also extended to the convicts.
