The Sindh High Court has set aside the conviction of a man in a blasphemy case as the prosecution failed to prove charges against him.Notan Lal was sentenced to life imprisonment by the additional district and sessions court of Sukkur for making some blasphemous remarks and inciting religious hatred inside a classroom at the Sindh Public School Ghotki.
According to the prosecution, complainant Abdul Aziz lodged an FIR on September 14, 2019 that his son Mohammad Ibtisam, a student of school, told him that the owner of the school, Notan Lal, entered the classroom in the course of a lecture and in their presence made sacrilegious remarks.
The appellant’s counsel submitted that the appellant has been falsely implicated in the case as he has not committed the alleged offence. He submitted that the story has been contrived by the complainant to take revenge form him for not giving him a job in the school and demanding the outstanding fee of his son from him.
The counsel submitted that complainant was encouraged and exploited by local orthodox clerics in registering the case against the appellant, who is a non-Muslim.He submitted that no proper investigation was conducted in the case and the relevant SSP, the IO, simply in one day wound up the entire investigation by sitting in the office of the DSP Ghotki.
The counsel said that there were material contradictions in the evidence of witnesses and there was an unexplained delay of 15 days in recording statements of witnesses under Section 161 of the CrPC. The additional prosecutor general and the complainant’s counsel supported the trial court order and submitted that there were sufficient evidence against the appellant to uphold the conviction against him. A single bench at Sukkur, headed by Justice Mohammad Iqbal Kalhoro, after hearing the arguments of the counsel, observed that except Mohammad Sharif and Gurdas Mul, who was taking the class when appellant allegedly intervened and passed derogatory remarks, were produced as witnesses, and none else from among 11 for the reasons not revealed by the prosecution was examined as a witness in the trial.
The court observed that the FIR was registered against the appellant missing the name of the relevant witnesses and any precise specification about actual profane words allegedly spoken by the appellant.
