Death penalty for man who shot friend dead

Mansoor Khan had shot dead one of his best friends when he stopped him from smoking hash.

KARACHI: Drugs can kill you. For Mansoor Khan, hashish spelled his doom - not directly but by death penalty.

In a fit of intoxicated rage, he shot dead one of his best friends when he stopped him from smoking hash. “To be hanged till death,” announced the district and session judge, Muhammad Yamin on Tuesday, striking the gavel.

Mansoor Khan was convicted under Section 265-H(2) of the Criminal Procedure Code for murdering Mohammad Zeeshan. The case was proved with the help six witnesses, a post-mortem report and ballistics investigation.

The murder took place on May 31, 2009, when the accused, the victim and their two friends, Zubair Mohammad and Ashraf Ali, were sitting at a cattle farm in Shah Faisal Colony. Zeeshan had a quarrel with Mansoor over smoking hashish. The shouting match turned ugly when Mansoor took out his pistol and shot at Zeeshan, killing him on the spot. The case (95/2009) was registered at the Sharafi Goth police station. The killer was arrested and the murder weapon - a .30 pistol - was seized. Three bullet casings were found at the crime scene. The charge sheet against Mansoor was submitted for his trial in the court by the investigating officer, Malik Jahan Khan.

Both witnesses, Zubair and Ashraf, were subjected to a lengthy cross examination, but corroborated each other without any significant contradictions.

The forensic report confirmed that the shells collected from the cattle farm were fired from the same pistol found with the accused. The striker pin marks, breech marks and chamber marks were all similar.

“Zeeshan died due to an acute chest injury. Irreversible hypovolaemia shock [blood loss] led to the cardio-respiratory arrest caused by through the firearm discharge,” stated Dr H. Zeeshan Haider, who did the autopsy.

The defence lawyer did his best to cross-examine the doctor at length but failed to falsify the cause of death, said the lawyer of Zeeshan’s family, Riaz Ahmed Bhatti, while talking to The Express Tribune.

Earlier, Mansoor had claimed that Zeeshan’s brother, a policeman, had always objected to their friendship and he had falsely implicated him in the case. He declined, however, to give a sworn statement under Section 340(2) of the Criminal Procedure Code against the allegations.

Zeeshan and Mansoor were childhood friends, said the victim’s bother, Muhammad Imran. “Mansoor killed my brother because he was jealous of his success,” he alleged. “Zeeshan had helped him at every stage of his life with whatever he could from lending money to trying to take him to London with him. But Mansoor had other plans for him.” Zeeshan’s wife, Isha Ishaque, a British national, says her son, Zackariyah, was just three months old when his father was murdered. “Now he is three years old and asks about his father all the time,” she said. “Zackariyah believes that his father sleeps in a box. I don’t have the answer to his questions.”

She had earlier complained about the slow judicial process also. “We have spent so much money [on the case]. It was such a disorganised system.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 27^th, 2012.

Correction: An earlier version of the article was running an incorrect picture caption. The caption has been fixed.