KARACHI: A district and sessions court in Karachi handed over life imprisonment to film director Mansoor Mujahid and his friend Anab Hameed for the murder of their friend Faisal Nabi in 2013.
The court also ordered both convicts to pay Rs200,000 each to Nabi’s heirs as compensation. The court kept the case as dormant against a third accused Masooma Zainab Abidi — who is absconding and was charged for abetting — until her arrest or surrender.
Mujahid and Hameed were booked for killing their friend Nabi, a banker by profession, in July 2013. Nabi, who had just shifted to Karachi from Dubai at the time, was shot dead in an apartment in the metropolis’ Defence Housing Authority neighborhood.
According to the prosecution, Mujahid and his friends were consuming party drugs at Hameed’s apartment when a heated argument broke out between the victim and the director, who shot Nabi.
The prosecution said that Mujahid, with common intention and consultation with Hameed and Abidi, had used an unlicensed weapon to shoot Nabi. The court was further told that after shooting the victim, both convicts and Abidi dumped Nabi’s body — after stabbing and burning it in order to hide the identity of the deceased — in the parking lot of the apartment building.
An FIR, No. 191/2013, had been registered under Sections 302 (premeditated murder) and 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) on the complaint of the victim’s brother-in-law, Nayal Khan, at the Clifton police station. The police had also registered another FIR, No. 192/2013, under section 13-B of Pakistan Arms Ordinance, 1965, against Mujahid for possessing an illegal weapon.
Mujahid and Hameed were indicted for the murder in 2014. The prosecution informed the court that during the investigation by an inquiry officer, Mujahid had confessed to shooting Nabi twice, while Hameed admitted that she had stabbed the victim and led the police to a place where the body, pistol, daggers, blood-stained pillow and bedcovers were found.
The prosecution said that during the investigation, Hameed had said that Nabi had assaulted her a few days before the murder and that she had written about the incident in her diary that was read by Mujahid.
