An anti-terrorism court (ATC) on Tuesday reserved its judgement till Aug 12 on the extrajudicial killing case of Sarfaraz Shah after recording final arguments from both the defence and prosecution sides.
Defence counsels Amir Warraich and Shaukat Hayat in their final arguments said that prosecution utterly failed to prove the allegations against the accused people. They added that Sarfaraz Shah was a criminal and was arrested red-handed while robbing people. When Rangers officials tried to arrest him, he tried to snatch a rifle and was accidentally killed. The counsels pleaded for the acquittal of accused men.
Special Public Prosecutor Muhammad Khan Buriro in his final arguments appealed to the court to award major punishment to the accused as they not only killed an innocent youth but also spread a sense of fear and insecurity among the public.
He said that the prosecution presented 20 prosecution witnesses and all of them supported the allegations. All witnesses had identified the killers and said that following the murder of the youth, they were terrified and felt insecure.
Two prosecution witnesses stated before the court that after watching the footage of the incident on TV, they were terrified.
“The forensic and chemical examiner’s reports also support the prosecution,” Buriro added.
He said that the defence had produced two witnesses. The statement of one of them, Alam Zaib, cannot be considered valid due to his “character”. The second witness, who introduced himself as a Pakistan Rangers colonel, could not prove his identity although court had granted him sufficient time to present military establishment’s written permission, which is mandatory when any army official appears before a civil court.
The murder of this unarmed youth is nothing but a “Fake Encounter Killing”.Today hon’ble Supreme Court in India has said Police personnel involved in fake encounter killings should be awarded death sentence and hanged.A bench of justices Markandeya Katju and C K Prasad said that police personnel as custodians of law are expected to protect people and not eliminate them as contract killers.“ Fake encounter killings by cops are nothing but cold blooded brutal murder which should be treated as the rarest of rare offence and police personnel responsible for it should be awarded death sentence. They should be hanged,” Justice Katju, heading the bench, said. The killing of Sarfaraz Shah, which was indeed very shocking and gruesome should be treated exactly on the same lines and the guilty should deserve nothing less than death penalty.
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