LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) has set aside the death sentence of Muhammad Hassan, convicted of shooting dead one cousin and wounding another in Okara district. The court found the prosecution’s own documents contradicted its account of when, where and how the crime took place.
A division bench comprising Chief Justice Aalia Neelum and Justice Abher Gul Khan, who authored the judgment. The verdict was announced on September 7, 2026, and the appellant was ordered released forthwith unless wanted in another case.
FIR No. 36/2021 was registered on January 17, 2021 at Police Station Mandi Ahmad Abad under Sections 302 and 324 PPC. Complainant Bagh Ali alleged that at about 3pm his nephew, the appellant, fired a .12-bore repeater at his sons while they were cutting fodder. One shot killed Muhammad Imran and another hit Muhammad Ikram in the face. He cited an unspecified family dispute as the motive.
On July 28, 2022, the Additional Sessions Judge/MCTC, Depalpur, sentenced Hassan to death, with Rs500,000 compensation to the heirs. He also received ten years’ rigorous imprisonment and a Rs50,000 fine for the attempted murder.
The FIR was lodged at 7:30pm, about four and a half hours after the alleged shooting, on a computer-typed application whose writer was never identified. The complainant also had a mobile phone. The bench, citing Muhammad Jahangir vs. The State (2024 SCMR 1741), held that the FIR could not be treated as spontaneous.
The medico-legal certificate of the injured son showed he reached RHC Mandi Ahmad Abad at 5:15pm, escorted by a police sub-inspector. That meant police knew of the incident well before the FIR. The same officer, however, testified that he reached the scene only at 8:45pm and sent the injured for examination at about 9pm.
The doctor recorded that the injured man had said a fight took place at about 4pm, that one person fired, and did not name anyone. The doctor estimated the injuries to be one to two hours old. The injured witness also gave the police his statement only three months later, and no record of his claimed stay at Mayo Hospital was produced.
The complainant admitted his house was about two acres from the field and that, by the time police arrived, his son’s body was lying on a cot in the courtyard. Yet both he and the investigating officer conceded that there was no blood trail between the fodder field and the house. The Punjab Forensic Science Agency (PFSA) found no human blood in the soil lifted from the alleged scene. The court said the prosecution had failed to establish the place of occurrence itself.
The body reached the mortuary only in the early hours of January 18, roughly twelve hours after the death. The autopsy doctor also estimated that the deceased survived 20 to 30 minutes after being shot, which the court found hard to reconcile with eyewitnesses who made no attempt to take him to hospital.
Police said Hassan was arrested on January 25, 2021 and led them to the weapon on January 31. But the complainant admitted in cross-examination that one Shah Nawaz Shangrah had produced Hassan, along with the gun, on January 18, the day after the shooting. The crime empties reached the PFSA only on January 21. Because they were dispatched after the accused and weapon were already with police, the court said tampering could not be ruled out, and the matching ballistics report lost its value.
The motive also went unproved. The investigating officer admitted that no one was produced to verify the alleged family quarrel and that women of the family were never questioned. Relying on Muhammad Ashraf alias Acchu, the court described motive as a double-edged weapon.
The judgment is another example of the LHC acquitting convicts in capital cases because of basic investigative lapses, a pattern From Death Row to Acquittal. It follows other rulings in which the court found prosecution cases doubtful. The court’s questions about timelines, forensic chains and missing records are ones investigators in Okara and elsewhere will need to answer at the start of an investigation, not at the appeal stage.
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