Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Justice Asif Saeed Khosa has said that if people cannot speak the truth in the courts they should not expect justice from the courts.

“Justice system is based on truth. People bring fake witnesses and conceal the truth as a result real culprits are exonerated,” he said while presiding over a three-member bench of the Supreme Court (SC) during the hearing of a murder case on Friday.

When the SC bench took up the case against the acquittal of murder accused Abdul Marjan by the Peshawar High Court (PHC), petitioner’s counsel Sardar Ismat Ullah took the plea that the accused killed Raz Wali in the presence of some people.

He asked the apex court to set aside the verdict of the PHC and pleaded that order be issued to arrest the accused again.

Earlier, the accused was charged with the murder of Wali over a land dispute in Kirk. The trial court awarded life imprisonment but later the Peshawar High Court (PHC) acquitted him.

However, the apex court said, “There is doubt about the presence of the witnesses. It was said in the FIR that the bullets were fired from Tupac gun by the accused and firing continued for four minutes. But the postmortem report says that only one bullet hit the victim. The FIR was registered by the petitioner at 6 o’clock while postmortem report was prepared at 7.45 o’clock. According to postmortem report, Wali was killed 15 minutes before he was brought to the hospital, and the petitioner had admitted that he was informed about the incident by his nephew.”

The court while hearing the arguments of Sheikh Kamran and Shahzad Siddiqui, the counsels for the accused, and prosecutor Zahid Yousuf, dismissed the appeal against the acquittal of the accused and upheld the high court’s verdict.