ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s federal government will file a petition against the acquittal of the prime suspects and their co-accused for the murder of a police officer’s son in 2012, the attorney general’s office said, in a case seen as a test of whether members of the country’s privileged elite could be held accountable by the law.
On Tuesday, a three-member bench of the Supreme Court acquitted Siraj Talpur, Shahrukh Jatoi and others for the murder of 20-year-old Shahzeb Khan in 2012. In 2013, an Anti-Terrorism Court had awarded death sentences to Jatoi and Talpur.
“The office of the Attorney-General will be filing a review petition against the judgment of the Supreme Court ... pending issuance of detailed reasons, in the interest of justice,” a statement from attorney general’s office said on Tuesday, expressing concern that the top court had issued the acquittal order without seeking the advice of the country’s top legal office.
“This is despite the instant case having already been adjudicated to be one of constitutional importance by the Supreme Court, which mandates seeking the assistance of the Attorney-General – as has been sought in pervious petitions pertaining to the same matter,” the statement read.
On the night of December 24, 2012, Khan, the son of a deputy superintendent of police (DSP), was gunned down in Karachi’s Defense Housing Authority while returning home from a wedding with his sister.
The murder took place after Khan got into a fight with Ghulam Murtaza Lashari, the staff member of a wealthy family, for threatening and harassing his sister. As the conflict intensified, Siraj Talpur, Lashari’s employer, and one of his friends, Jatoi, went after Khan and gunned him down.
Then Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry took suo motu notice of the incident, which sparked widespread outrage on mainstream and social media and raised questions over accountability for Pakistan’s privileged elite.
A few months after the ATC handed down death sentences to the key accused in 2013, Khan’s parents issued a formal pardon for the convicts, which was approved by the Sindh High Court (SHC).
Despite the pardon, however, the death penalty was upheld because the charges included that of terrorism. In 2017, the murder case took a dramatic turn when the Sindh High Court dropped the terror charges and ordered a retrial, striking down the death penalty awarded to the convicts by the ATC and converting it into life imprisonment.
In its order, the SHC said an act of revenge over personal enmity did not equate to an act of terrorism. The convicts then approached the Supreme Court against the life sentences, which acquitted them on Tuesday.
Pakistani law allows criminal cases against those charged with a killing to be dropped if the families of their victims forgive them, or accept a “blood money” offering instead.
The forgiveness option in the law can effectively waive a complainant’s right to seek the punishment of the accused. Changing the law to remove the possibility of “forgiveness” could help cut the number of killings in Pakistan, experts have long argued.
