KARACHI: A woman Asma has been sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Karachi for strangling and also electrocuting her husband Shah Zaman in 2019 with the help of her lover Ghulam Nabi alias Deedar. After delivering the verdict in the murder case, the Additional District and Sessions Judge (West) also awarded death sentence to Deedar. Convicts attended the hearing via video link from their prisons. The court also ordered the convicts to pay a fine of Rs 500,000 each as compensation to the legal heirs of the slain man. During the hearing, the prosecution informed the court that the perpetrators tried to stage the crime to make it look like a suicide. However, relatives of the deceased took his body to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for post-mortem after noticing scars on his wrists, chest, feet, ankles and neck. An autopsy confirmed that Shah Zaman died due to strangulation and electric shocks, prompting the complainant Irfan Ahmed to file a First Information Report (FIR). On the other hand, Deedar’s defense counsel argued that his client’s name was not originally included in the case and that the complainant Ahmed himself did not witness the incident. Besides, there was a delay in registering the FIR at the Pirabad police station. The court stated in its verdict that the accused woman confessed to her crime before the court and apparently planned the murder. Additionally, testimony from Zaman’s two sons, who were among the eyewitnesses, confirmed the relationship between Asma and Deedar. The statements also revealed that the defendant laced her husband’s milk with sedatives before going to bed, the court noted. After sentencing the convicts, the court directed the wardens of the respective jails to execute the sentences and issue the conviction certificates for Asma and Deedar. As for the second convict, he directed the authorities concerned to initiate proceedings in the Sindh High Court under Section 374 of the Penal Code and the death sentence will not be carried out unless confirmed by the SHC.
