Noor Mukadam case: SC fixes hearing of Zahir Jaffer’s review plea for April 8
The Supreme Court has fixed the hearing of Zahir Jaffer’s review plea in the Noor Mukadam murder case for Wednesday, April 8.
Noor, aged 27 years, was found murdered at Zahir’s Islamabad residence in July 2021, with the probe revealing she was tortured by him before being beheaded. Zahir’s death sentence by the trial court had already been upheld by the Islamabad High Court (IHC), but he had sought a review of the verdict in July of last year.
The convict, Zahir, seeks a review of his conviction in the 2021 murder case.
In a cause list published online by the SC on Saturday, the date for Zahir’s hearing was fixed for April 8.
The 47-page review petition was filed by Advocate Khawaja Haris on behalf of Zahir under Article 188 of the Constitution (review of judgments or orders by SC). The state and Noor’s father, Shaukat Ali Muqadam, were made the respondents.
The petition contended that the issue of Zahir’s alleged “unsoundness of mind or mental capacity” that was raised before the SC in an application had not been addressed and was “given short shrift”.
On the rape charges, the review plea argued that it was “apparent from the record that there is no evidence on the record in proof of this allegation”.
The SC had commuted Zahir’s death sentence on the rape charge to life imprisonment, as decided by the trial court, but did not acquit him of it. While he was acquitted of the 10-year sentence for kidnapping, a one-year term was handed down for wrongful confinement under Section 342 of the Pakistan Penal Code, according to the SC verdict.
Zahir’s review plea argued that the video recordings, based on which the SC upheld the death sentence, had not been proved during the trial and were not provided to any of the accused.
It said the apex court ruling was extensively based on video recordings stored in a digital video recorder (DVR) and on clips that the prosecution said were transferred from the DVR to a hard disk, providing the “most essential link in the chain of circumstances” on which the SC gave its verdict.
The SC, in its detailed verdict, had stressed the significance of digital evidence by declaring that footage can be admissible as primary evidence under the “silent witness theory” — a rule of evidence that allows for photographic video or other recorded evidence to be admitted as substantive proof of what it depicts, without the need for an eyewitness’s testimony.
Noor was found murdered at a residence in Islamabad’s upscale Sector F-7/4 on July 20, 2021. A first information report (FIR) was registered later the same day against Jaffer, who was arrested at the site of the murder.
In February 2022, a district and sessions judge sentenced Jaffer to death for the murder and handed him 25 years of rigorous imprisonment, finding him guilty of rape. His household staff, Mohammad Iftikhar and Jan Mohammad — co-accused in the case — were each sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Zahir’s parents, leading businessman Zakir Jaffer and Asmat Adamji, had been indicted by an Islamabad district and sessions court in October 2021 but were later acquitted by the court.
