ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court (SC) on Monday directed the petitioners to submit the case record in a proper arrangement as it resumed hearing in the long-running Shahzeb Khan murder case.
The three convicts — Shahrukh Jatoi, Siraj Talpur and Ghulam Murtaza Lashari — had submitted petitions seeking to overturn their punishments in the eight-year-old case.
The three-judge bench, headed by Justice Maqbool Baqar and comprising Justice Yahya Afridi and Justice Qazi Muhammad Amin Ahmed, also issued a notice to the members of Khan’s family on Jatoi’s request.
During the hearing, the counsel for the convicts insisted since a compromise was reached between the two parties, the sentences should be commuted. At this, Justice Qazi Muhammad Amin asked the counsel to submit the agreement.
“Your case record is not arranged, submit the papers again in a proper manner,” he said and adjourned further hearing for three weeks.
In December 2012, 20-year-old Khan, the son of a deputy superintendent of police (DSP), was gunned down in a Defence Housing Authority (DHA) neighbourhood in Karachi after picking up a fight with a servant of Jatoi, the murderer, purportedly for harassing his sister.
According to witnesses, Jatoi and his three accomplices chased and shot Khan to punish him for roughing up the servant.
In June 2013, an anti-terrorism court (ATC) sentenced Jatoi and Talpur to death while Sajjad Talpur and Ghulam Murtaza Lashari, the Talpurs’ servant, were handed life imprisonment for their involvement in the crime.
A couple of months after the sentence, however, Khan’s parents had issued a formal pardon to the convicts.
The SHC in November 2017 set aside the death penalty and ordered a retrial after Jatoi’s counsel, Farooq H Naek, successfully argued that terrorism charges should not have been included in the case.
Five years into the case, in January 2018, the apex court took up the case as it admitted for hearing a request seeking to strike down the high court’s decision.
