Sessions’ court sentences blasphemy convict to death

Man accused of asking him to do so was given benefit of doubt and acquitted.

LAHORE: A man was sentenced to death in a blasphemy case on Friday. However, the person accused of asking him to say the allegedly blasphemous words was given the benefit of doubt and released.

Additional District and Sessions Judge Muhammad Naveed Iqbal passed the order on a petition filed by Qari Shaukat Ali against the caretaker of a shrine and a devotee. The judge sentenced the devotee to death and fined him Rs1 million.

Mughalpura police station had registered a case against the two men under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code in January 2012. SP Captain (retd) Liaquat Ali Malik conducted the investigation and presented a challan before the court.

Counsel for the complainant, Advocate Ghulam Mustafa Chaudhry, told the court that his client was the imam of a mosque situated next to the shrine. He said he woke up early morning for tahajjat prayers and heard a commotion in the graveyard next to the mosque. He said Ali went to the graveyard and saw the caretaker of the shrine directing a devotee to blaspheme. Ali told them to stop but they used abusive language and threatened him with dire consequences, Advocate Chaudhry said. Meanwhile, he said, Ali had recorded parts of the conversation in which one of the two could be heard blaspheming.

The caretaker of the shrine told the court that Ali was trying to implicate him in a false case. He said Ali had visited him and asked him to handover some of the shrine land so that he could build his hujra on it. The caretaker said that he had refused and Ali had threatened him with dire consequences. The devotee told the court that he had no connection with the case and had been falsely accused.

Previously, the shrine caretaker had filed four after-arrest bail pleas before the court which had been dismissed.

His counsel had told the court that the audio evidence presented in the case had not been verified by the Forensic Science Laboratory, which had sent back a note saying that they did not have the equipment required to analyse audio evidence. He said that Ali had told the court that he had recorded the verbal exchange from the mosque. “How can a low grade Chinese-made phone record audio from a distance of at least 35 feet away,” he said.

He had said that the sole witness of the incident was a man who lived with the complainant in his mosque.He told the court that it had become a routine matter for people to use the blasphemy law to settle personal scores.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 21^st, 2015.