After a hiatus of almost eight years, an anti-terrorism court in Karachi on Friday finally sentenced four men to life in the murder case of Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) director and social activist Perween Rahman.
The verdict was announced by a special court at the Karachi Central Jail, where the accused including Raheem Swati, Ahmed Khan alias Pappu Kashmiri, Amjad Hussain, and Ayaz Swati were handed down double life terms for shooting dead the OPP head near her office in the metropolis in 2013.
The court sentenced three of them to 57 years and six months imprisonment while Raheem Swati to 50 years and his son Imran Swati — the fifth accused — to 7.5 years.
The judge of the ATC-VII also imposed a fine of Rs200,000 on each of them.
Rahman, a postgraduate diploma in housing, building and urban planning from the Institute of Housing Studies in Rotterdam, Netherlands, was killed on March 13, 2013, when four gunmen opened fire on her vehicle near Pirabad police station in Orangi Town, ending her 28-year-long career for advocating for land and basic services rights for the underprivileged.
Also read: Seven years on, Perween Rahman murder case lingers
She had been an outspoken critic of the land mafias in Karachi and their political patrons.
In 2020, a joint investigation team (JIT) had told the Supreme Court that the motive behind the killing of Rahman was land grabbing.
"The motive behind her murder was to grab the OPP office land. The accused were Pashtun and could not tolerate a Bihari lady heading a major organisation in the predominantly Pashtun and Afghan area,” read the JIT final report submitted to the apex court.
The report also stated that the JIT had found no evidence of the involvement of any tycoon in the murder.
“She had neither named any influential person as being a threat to her nor had she been involved in a dispute with anyone except her neighbour, Raheem Swati.”
The court had reserved its verdict on October 15 after it had recorded the evidence and final arguments in the eight-year-long trial.
However, the pronouncement of the verdict was postponed after the prosecutor had moved an application on October 28 for framing an amended charge against the accused for hatching a conspiracy to kill Rahman.
The court had dismissed the application on November 25.
Initially, a case for Rahman’s murder was registered under Sections 302 (premeditated murder) and 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code at the Pirabad police station.
Later, Section 7 (punishment for acts of terrorism) of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997, was added to the FIR on the basis of a judicial inquiry conducted by then-district and sessions judge (west) Ghulam Mustafa Memon on the orders of the Supreme Court.
In March, the ATC was told that Rahman had identified and named “land grabbers and extortionists” for trying to illegally occupy the land of the OPP's office in an interview recorded around 15 months before she was allegedly killed by the same group.
In the interview, Rahman had called Raheem a “land grabber and extortionist” and said he wanted to illegally occupy the land of the OPP’s office.
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