PESHAWAR, June 2: The NWFP government has decided to oppose the sentence of death by stoning in public slapped on Zafran Bibi by a trial court in Kohat, before the Federal Shariat Court, which has fixed June 5 for hearing the case in Islamabad.

“We will definitely oppose the sentence purely on legal grounds,” NWFP Advocate-General Barrister Jehanzeb Raheem told Dawn here.

He said the government believed that in the instant case the sentence should not be awarded under Hadd.

The principal law officer of the province said in the present circumstances the government could not support the controversial verdict at any cost.

The provincial government would be represented before the shariat court by the provincial advocate-general and Additional Advocate-General Mussarat Hillali.

In the legal circles Mr Raheem, a former president of the Peshawar High Court Bar Association, is considered a progressive lawyer, whereas Ms Hillali is a known human rights activist who had also served as vice-chairperson of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

Sources in the law department told Dawn that the legal brains of the government believed that the verdict of the additional district and sessions judge, Kohat, was suffering from various lacunas and even the requirements given in the Offence of Zina (Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance 1979 were not fulfilled before awarding such a harsh sentence.

It was due to the same reason that the spouse of the NWFP Governor, Ms Iftikhar Hussain Shah, provincial Law Minister Athar Minallah and Ms Hillali, visited Kohat prison and met Zafran Bibi there, a government official said.

Moreover, he stated, under the ordinance there were two conditions which had to be fulfilled before awarding a sentence under Hudood: confession by an accused; or evidence of four truthful male Muslim witnesses.

The shariat court in two of its judgments (PLD 1986 FSC 274 and PLD 1988 FSC 42) had placed certain restrictions on recording confessional statement of an accused for awarding a sentence under Hadd and in the present case those restrictions were not followed by the trial court while recording the statement of the condemned female, he claimed.

It is worth mentioning that a three-member bench of the Federal Shariat Court, which will be headed by Chief Justice Fazal Illahi Khan, will hear on June 5 the appeal of Zafran Bibi and reference of the Kohat sessions court for confirmation of the sentence. Malik Fakhre Azam and Zafarullah Khan will represent the female.

The appellant’s counsel claimed that she had never recorded any confessional statement.