ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court (SC) will take up on Monday the petitions of a suspect and his accomplices against the conviction in the headline-grabbing Shahzeb Khan murder case.
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 Shahrukh 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 co-accused Nawab Siraj Talpur to death. Sajjad Talpur and Ghulam Murtaza Lashari, the Talpurs’ servant, were handed life imprisonment for their involvement in the murder.
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.
A three-member bench, headed by Justice Maqbool Baqar and comprising Justice Yahya Afridi and Justice Qazi Muhammad Amin Ahmed, will hear the case on Monday. The registrar office has issued notices to stakeholders.
