EDITORIAL: Announcing its much-awaited decision on Thursday in the Noor Muqadam murder case, an Islamabad district and sessions court sentenced the primary accused Zahir Jaffer to death and the two co-accused to 10-year imprisonment each. The case had grabbed public attention for its sheer ghastliness.
The 27-year-old Noor’s beheaded body was discovered from Zahir’s home after a neighbour alerted the police. He was arrested while still in blood-drenched clothes. CCTV footage from a nearby house’s camera showed how the young woman had jumped from the first floor balcony of the house and headed for the gate to save her life, but the family’s guard and gardener helped Zahir to catch her and take inside for the gruesome act.
His parents were also arrested for trying to help him cover up the crime over the phone and sending six employees from their Therapy Works setup for the purpose. These people have been acquitted. The victim’s father has said he would challenge the acquittal of all other accused.
The murderer had initially confessed to his crime before the police and the court, though he later claimed innocence. There was enough evidence of his guilt in the form of CCTV footage, call data records, digital video record, DNA samples and forensic report, which pointed to a cold-blooded pre-meditated murder.
It was an open and shut case. Unfortunately, some people in the media, unable to suppress their deep-seated gender bias, have been indirectly blaming the parents by making such insensitive comments as to why did they allow their daughter to spend time, as she told them, with friends.
These people surely would not have raised that point had the victim been a male child. No one deserves what happened to Noor Muqadam. Even though her father has expressed satisfaction over the way the proceedings concluded, he did mention ‘ups and downs’. A general experience of ordinary people is more of downs than ups. In fact, some have argued that in this case a better outcome was expected since not only the guilty party but the aggrieved party also belonged to an influential section of society; and that the media had also kept spotlighting the proceedings. But then only recently the accused in the murder of social media star Qandeel Baloch, which made headlines in the national as well as international media, walked free. Even so, public cynicism needs to be noted and addressed by all concerned.
Notably, this case was heard on a regular basis rather than dragging on and on as is the norm even where the law sets a specific timeframe for resolution. The NAB law, for instance, calls for deciding a case within 30 days, but many high profile ones have lingered on for as long as 20 years, evidently, as a favour to the accused. In other cases, suspects belonging to disadvantaged sections of society remain languishing in jails for decades on end before given a chance to prove innocence, which amounts to denial of justice. A lot needs to change for ordinary people to have trust in the judicial system.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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