BAHAWALPUR: The Lahore High Court’s Bahawalpur Bench has acquitted two men serving life sentences for the murder of a 17-year-old boy in Dunyapur, district Lodhran. The court found that prosecutors never established that the badly decomposed body they recovered was his.
Justice Syed Farhad Ali Shah allowed Criminal Appeal No. 322-J of 2020, filed by Muhammad Qasim alias Kashoo, and Criminal Appeal No. 24 of 2021, filed by Muhammad Tariq. He also dismissed a revision petition by the boy’s mother seeking harsher sentences.
According to the prosecution, Umar Farooq left home at about 7pm on January 1, 2019 to see Qasim and did not return. His mother, Mst. Kausar Bibi, said call data records showed five calls from her son’s phone to Qasim’s, the last at 6:47pm that day. She said that when confronted, Qasim admitted the boy had come to him for money but refused to say more, even after a panchayat intervened.
FIR No. 175/2019 was registered at Police Station Saddar, Dunyapur, on April 12, 2019. Qasim was arrested on May 12, 2019. Police said that on May 18, 2019, both accused jointly pointed out a spot in Chak No. 237/W.B., Mouza Haiderabad, where a body was dug up. On December 21, 2020, the Additional Sessions Judge, Dunyapur, convicted both under Section 302(b)/34 PPC, sentenced each to life imprisonment and ordered Rs200,000 in compensation to the legal heirs.
Because nobody witnessed the killing, the case rested entirely on circumstantial evidence. The court noted that such evidence must form an unbroken chain pointing only to guilt, and that a single missing link is fatal.
The first weak link was a delay of three months and twelve days in reporting the matter, even though the police station was only nine miles away. The court did not accept the explanation that the family had been trying to secure the boy’s release through the accused. If they believed he was in the accused’s illegal custody, it asked, why stay silent for so long?
The second was the recovery itself. The site plan recorded both accused’s names at the recovery point, showing a joint pointation. Citing Muhammad Mushtaq v. Mustansar Hussain (2016 SCMR 2123), the court held that a joint recovery of a body on the pointation of several accused is inadmissible.
The decisive gap was identity. The medical officer who performed the autopsy on May 18, 2019 recorded that the body was totally putrefied and unidentifiable. Under cross-examination, he conceded that the cause of death could not be given even after the forensic report. No DNA analysis was placed on record, and the court said nothing established that the remains were those of Umar Farooq.
The recovery of a mobile phone fared no better. The investigating officer admitted he had not verified the IMEI number or checked the ownership of the SIM, and that the complainant had not produced the phone’s box. The court held that this recovery was of no help to the prosecution.
Relying on Supreme Court precedents including Ali Imran and Iftikhar Ahmad alias Papu, the court reiterated that even a single circumstance creating reasonable doubt entitles an accused to acquittal as a matter of right, not grace. It set aside the conviction. Both men were on bail, and their bail bonds were discharged.
The judgment adds to a line of recent LHC rulings in which convictions have collapsed on basic investigative gaps, as in the acquittal of Umar Hayat in a life-sentence case last month. A senior journalist examined the trend in why the LHC keeps overturning murder verdicts. For a family still without certainty about what happened to their son, the ruling underlines what a DNA test might have settled.
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