Latest news with #ZahirJaffer
Business Recorder
24-07-2025
- Business Recorder
Noor Mukadam's murder case: SC urged to review judgement upholding death sentence of Zahir Jaffer
ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court has been asked to review its judgment upholding the death sentence of Zahir Jaffer for the gruesome murder of Noor Mukadam. Zahir Zakir Jaffer on Wednesday, through senior lawyer Khawaja Haris Ahmed, filed a review petition against the Supreme Court's judgment dated May 20, 2025. The petitioner contended that the judgment dated 20-05-2025 relies heavily upon the video recordings, and on that basis the capital punishment of the petitioner has been upheld, without taking into account that neither the DVR nor the hard disk stand proved during the course of the trial. 'On the contrary, the portions of these so-called recordings, on the basis whereof the inference of 'last seen' has been drawn against the petitioner, were never played during the trial,' it added. He maintained that during the proceedings in the appeal before the Islamabad High Court (IHC) when the hard disk was required to be played it was empty, while DVR was never played, rather portion of video clip in USB, provided by one of the appellant's counsel was played and made the basis of the judgment in the appeal. The USB is neither primary evidence, nor its authenticity is vouchsafed by any forensic report. He submitted that DVR and hard disk is not proved by PFSA's forensic report as per the law prevalent at the relevant date and time, as neither the scribe nor the executant (concerned forensic expert) entered into witness box to authenticate the same on oath, therefore, the PFSA's forensic report has no credibility. Khawaja Haris, who has drafted the review petition, stated that the judgment also suffers from an error apparent on the face of the record as it has not addressed the issue of unsoundness of mind or mental capacity of the petitioner that was raised before the apex court during the course of arguments by the petitioner's counsel. The petitioner's plea of unsoundness of mind or mental incapacity, though evident from his conduct and demeanour throughout the trial, was never given due weight or serious thought by the trial judgment, and even the IHC judges. He maintained that the record of trial court shows that the question of the mental capacity of the petitioner to stand trial was never taken or addressed seriously as mandated by the Supreme Court in inter alia Safia Bano's case. A three-member bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Justice Hashim Kakar, and comprising Justices Ishtiaq Ibrahim and Ali Baqar Najafi on May 20, 2025, upheld the death sentence of Zahir Jaffer for the gruesome murder of Noor Mukadam. It dismissed Zahir appeal against the IHC verdict. The death sentence in rape charge has been commuted to life imprisonment, and 10 years sentence in abduction charge has been reduced to one year. However, it maintained the earlier orders to Zahir to pay Rs0.5 million to Noor's legal heir. The bench also reduced the sentences of gardener Jan Muhammad and watchman Iftikhar, saying that the time the accused already served in jail is sufficient. Noor, aged 27 years, was found murdered at Zahir's Islamabad residence in July 2021, with the probe revealing she was tortured before being beheaded. Zahir's death sentence by the trial court was upheld by the IHC, which had also turned his jail term over rape charges into a second death penalty. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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Express Tribune
23-07-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
Zahir Jaffer seeks review of death penalty
Zahir Jaffer, the man convicted for the murder of Noor Muqadam, has moved the Supreme Court for the review of the apex court's decision to uphold the death awarded to him. The review petition, filed through Khawaja Haris, stated that "the hype created on the social media" constantly created hatred towards him throughout the investigation and the trial and even at appeal stage, thereby significantly breaching his fundamental right to fair trial and due process. The review petition states that the May 20 judgment did not address the issue of unsoundness of mind or mental capacity of the petitioner that was raised before this court. "It is submitted that the plea so raised on behalf of the petitioner is of immense significance, both as regards the validity of his trial as well as for purposes of determination of the petitioner's culpability and/or quantum of sentence," says the petition. "As such, leaving this matter undetermined has gravely prejudiced the interests of justice and the rights of the Petitioner as guaranteed by the Constitution in terms of Article 4, 9, and 10-A of the Constitution," it continues. "It is submitted with respect, to have been influenced by a planned and sustained campaign launched on social media, inter alia, by the complainant, against the Petitioner in particular, and, as such, the learned trial Judge never made any effort to consider the Petitioner's plea within the framework of law."
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Express Tribune
15-06-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
Same old dreams
Listen to article I've learned not to trust people. Diplomats, men with shining armors, ministers of the sovereign and those on their chrome horses, as soon as you see either, run away. If you see them all together, your mother's curse continues to haunt you. Should've been a better son/daughter. As Ronald Reagan put it "The most terrifying words in the English Language are: I am from the Government and I am here to help." You want to know who really rules over you? Try and see those who you cannot criticise. Those who can't stand criticism are probably the ones who run the game and call the shots. But now you know who runs the party. The ruler who throws the party and declares himself to be the DJ too. Speaking about the DJ, the government has recently directed all guest houses to have their guests registered mandatorily on what they call the 'Hotel Eye Software'. This software registers details of visitors. Such as name, date of birth and other personal credentials. It is said that this measure aims at curbing terrorism and illegal activities. By keeping an eye out on the identity of visitors, the government can now, maybe, anticipate who will engage in not so favourable activities. Here comes unsolicited advice from a man who doesn't know any better. Perpetrators do not stay at guesthouses or hotels. They have safe houses which tend to be off the radar. That was my one cent. The second cent is, we need Parliament Eye Software too. Where we as citizens keep an eye out on who is attending parliamentary sessions and see who is indulging in illegal activities. I reckon we're all prudent enough to fathom where most illegal activities happen. Yes, you guessed it right! The good old wax museum. While we're at it, let's also have a Court House Eye Software. After all, the citizens pay taxes, right? They have all the right to know who enters and exits court houses too. Imagine the scope of this 'eye software' and places we can deploy it in. Now that my views have been laid down and that too quite eloquently, let me clarify my position. The government shouldn't expect to crack down on terrorist activities by surveilling who sleeps where. At most, you'll end up cracking down on bad marriages. Your own house isn't in order (ask the Sunni Ittehad Council, they'll have something to say), why ruin someone else's? In other news, Zahir Jaffer is being sent to the gallows. I don't know when though. Maybe he'll spend the rest of his life on death row. But, despite such overwhelming evidence, it took more than 4 years for him to be sentenced. Need I say more? Unpopular opinion but I still think someone needs to get information out of Zahir Jaffer as to why he did what he did. There is no better way of learning homicidal behaviour than to speak with and study the perpetrator. Some MRIs, some CT scans and who knows, we might be able to build a blueprint of intervention programmes moving forward. There is wisdom with psychopaths and we need to extract that wisdom to ensure we protect our communities and our people in the future. Zahir Jaffer wasn't the first and he is most definitely not the last and for us to learn from our mistakes, we need to treat this man as a subject of a study. Nothing will justify what he did but we might learn about the workings of an Islamabadi psychopath's brain. Islamabadi just makes it sound more pretentious. What on God green's earth has gone wrong with the justice system in Islamabad? Judicial officers cannot seem to come to one page regarding how to run the system. The other day the paper said some judicial officer conceded to rifts within the system. What about the people who want justice and are not concerned with rifts? Fun fact, 172,000 people (skilled labour) have already left the country since January 2025.
Express Tribune
06-06-2025
- Express Tribune
Our grief is not justice
Another woman gone – and we are still playing the same old song and dance. Photo: File They say history is a great teacher. Unless, of course, we are talking about the treatment of women in Pakistan. In that case, the lessons rarely seem to stick. It is not that we forget what happened. In fact, on May 20 when the Supreme Court upheld Zahir Jaffer's death sentence, we proudly reposted '#JusticeForNoor'. We like the same photo of Zainab Ansari that makes the rounds on social media on her death anniversary, as many still comment that her killer should have been publicly hanged. We even speak of Qandeel Baloch's name with bated breath, recounting how unfortunate it was every time we see her picture make it back to our timeline. And now, we chant for 17-year-old Sana Yousaf. We demand the harshest punishment for her killer, calling for his swift execution, insisting that he be made an example of. We post her pictures with teary captions, share videos of her smiling, and ask: how a girl so young could be taken so violently. Outrage, by now, is a choreography we have learned by heart. And we really do mean it. And still, there is always another girl. And then another. And then another. And make no mistake, there always will be. Because ours is not a history of lessons learned – it is rot that keeps returning, like a cancer that festers in any corner it can find. 'Jaisi karni, waisi bharni' Allow us to demonstrate. On June 3, just hours after it was confirmed that Sana's murder was an act of hatred by Umar Hayat for rejecting his "friendship" proposal, social media was flooded with supportive comments. However, as the story goes, the sceptics eventually began to creep. One comment appeared. Then another. Then a third. But why was she on TikTok to begin with? Where are her parents? She must have had some involvement in this. What started as a clear case of rage on femicide by any definition of the word, swiftly flattened into a PR-friendly lecture on how girls should behave. Inevitably, rolling the red carpet for everyone's favorite pseudo-moralists, who, true to form, reach for their most iron-clad, tight-fisted defence: the Islam card. This ranged from throwaway one-liners about the necessity of modesty, casually dropped into comment sections, to full-blown fanatics spewing the most vile vitriol, calling for the swift "erasure" (being generous here) of all such women, because they are the ones spreading "fahaashi", leading society astray and betraying the word of God. Ironically, they consistently fail to acknowledge what Islam actually teaches: that there is no compulsion in religion, that justice is sacred, and that the burden of wrongdoing lies not on the victim, but the oppressor. But nuance, of course, rarely trends. Neither does picking a side, because celebrities with mammothian platforms, sweeped in at just the right time to provide half-baked statements of condemnation while simultaneously preaching the dangers of social media, the importance of privacy, and how young girls should be careful. Only a few and far between had the courage to call a spade a spade: a man felt entitled to a girl's life and he took it. It is not just the social media echo chamber that is pushing this narrative, too. Just last week, Justice Ali Baqir Najafi stood in the Supreme Court, following Jaffer's sentencing and described Noor's case as a warning against live-in relationships. Unfortunate and disgusting sure, but a cautionary tale, nevertheless. And so, the case of a woman who was tortured, killed, and beheaded became, somehow, a parable about lifestyle choices inviting danger. And the cancer does not stop at the courtroom. We saw this unfold in real time with the Dua Zehra case, where large media outlets and mainstream journalists after expressing their concerns, speculated on her character, questioned her sanity, painted her as rebellious, and amplified every salacious detail they could find. Our silent complicity Perhaps the most devastating betrayal comes when these words are repeated by our own. At the dinner table, the cancer lives in our mothers, who mourn the news as it plays on the television and then reinforce this is why girls should stay home. It grows in our grandmothers, who agree with them, sighing "in my day girls stayed quiet." It breathes in our cousin commenting, "this happens when girls don't stay within their limits". It thrives in phrases like, "apni izzat apne haath" (you are the guardian of your own honour). While there is some truth to the notion that we have a degree of control over the respect we receive from those around us, more often than not, this phrase is used in a deceptive way to teach young girls something far more insidious. It becomes a subtle, almost palatable way of implying: "What happened to you is sad but if you hadn't done this or that, you wouldn't have invited this trouble; maybe you could have saved yourself." So the point we arrive at is this: despite what we like to tell ourselves, these are not bad apples, or an "uneducated" few. This is the symptom of a society suspended in a coma, where shock is expected, but action is absent. Each time a woman's name becomes a headline, we jolt awake, shaken by our anger; we post tributes, we write captions, until slowly slipping back into a familiar sleep. The truth is, we live in a state of denial, of the unique willful kind, where we have learned to perform our grief. Public mourning has become our substitute for justice and expressions of solidarity have become our excuse to avoid confronting the systems and this has allowed this violence to happen again and again. Perhaps, at this point, this has paralysingly become our only choice. But at the very least, let us not pretend to be surprised. Let us not mourn Sana as if her death was unprecedented or unthinkable. The cancer that led us here is not new and it is not hiding. It has baked into our institutions, families, conversations and media. And it is now convincing us that our grief is enough. Which, for the record, it never was, and it never will be.
Express Tribune
05-06-2025
- Express Tribune
The rot that killed Sana Yousaf was never hiding
They say history is a great teacher. Unless, of course, we are talking about the treatment of women in Pakistan. In that case, the lessons rarely seem to stick. It is not that we forget what happened. In fact, on May 20 when the Supreme Court upheld Zahir Jaffer's death sentence, we proudly reposted '#JusticeForNoor'. We like the same photo of Zainab Ansari that makes the rounds on social media on her death anniversary, as many still comment that her killer should have been publicly hanged. We even speak of Qandeel Baloch's name with bated breath, recounting how unfortunate it was every time we see her picture make it back to our timeline. And now, we chant for 17-year-old Sana Yousaf. We demand the harshest punishment for her killer, calling for his swift execution, insisting that he be made an example of. We post her pictures with teary captions, share videos of her smiling, and ask: how a girl so young could be taken so violently. Outrage, by now, is a choreography we have learned by heart. And we really do mean it. And still, there is always another girl. And then another. And then another. And make no mistake, there always will be. Because ours is not a history of lessons learned - it is rot that keeps returning, like a cancer that festers in any corner it can find. 'Jaisi karni, waisi bharni' Allow us to demonstrate. On June 3, just hours after it was confirmed that Sana's murder was an act of hatred by Umar Hayat for rejecting his 'friendship' proposal, social media was flooded with supportive comments. However, as the story goes, the sceptics eventually began to creep. One comment appeared. Then another. Then a third. But why was she on TikTok to begin with? Where are her parents? She must have had some involvement in this. So, what started as a clear case of rage on femicide by any definition of the word, swiftly flattened into a PR-friendly lecture on how girls should behave. Inevitably, rolling the red carpet for everyone's favorite pseudo-moralists, who, true to form, reach for their most iron-clad, tight-fisted defence: the Islam card. This ranged from throwaway one-liners about the necessity of modesty, casually dropped into comment sections, to full-blown fanatics spewing the most vile vitriol, calling for the swift 'erasure' (being generous here) of all such women, because they are the ones spreading 'fahaashi', leading society astray and betraying the word of God. Ironically, they consistently fail to acknowledge what Islam actually teaches: that there is no compulsion in religion, that justice is sacred, and that the burden of wrongdoing lies not on the victim, but the oppressor. But nuance, of course, rarely trends. Neither does picking a side, because celebrities with mammothian platforms, sweeped in at just the right time to provide half-baked statements of condemnation while simultaneously preaching the dangers of social media, the importance of privacy, and how young girls should be careful. Only a few and far between had the courage to call a spade a spade: a man felt entitled to a girl's life and he took it. It is not just the social media echo chamber that is pushing this narrative, too. Just last week, Justice Ali Baqir Najafi stood in the Supreme Court, following Jaffer's sentencing and described Noor's case as a warning against live-in relationships. Unfortunate and disgusting sure, but a cautionary tale, nevertheless. And so, the case of a woman who was tortured, killed, and beheaded became, somehow, a parable about lifestyle choices inviting danger. And the cancer does not stop at the courtroom. We saw this unfold in real time with the Dua Zehra case, where large media outlets and mainstream journalists after expressing their concerns, speculated on her character, questioned her sanity, painted her as rebellious, and amplified every salacious detail they could find. Our silent complicity Perhaps the most devastating betrayal comes when these words are repeated by our own. At the dinner table, the cancer lives in our mothers, who mourn the news as it plays on the television and then reinforce this is why girls should stay home. It grows in our grandmothers, who agree with them, sighing 'in my day girls stayed quiet.' It breathes in our cousin commenting, 'this happens when girls don't stay within their limits'. It thrives in phrases like, 'apni izzat apne haath' (you are the guardian of your own honour). Undeniably, while there is some truth to the notion that we have a degree of control over the respect we receive from those around us, more often than not, this phrase is used in a deceptive way to teach young girls something far more insidious. It becomes a subtle, almost palatable way of implying: 'What happened to you is sad but if you hadn't done this or that, you wouldn't have invited this trouble; maybe you could have saved yourself.' So the point we arrive at is this: despite what we like to tell ourselves, these are not bad apples, or an 'uneducated' few. This is the symptom of a society suspended in a coma, where shock is expected, but action is absent. Each time a woman's name becomes a headline, we jolt awake, shaken by our anger; we post tributes, we write captions, until slowly slipping back into a familiar sleep. The truth is, we live in a state of denial, of the unique willful kind, where we have learned to perform our grief. Public mourning has become our substitute for justice and expressions of solidarity have become our excuse to avoid confronting the systems and this has allowed this violence to happen again and again. Perhaps, at this point, this has paralysingly become our only choice. But at the very least, let us not pretend to be surprised. Let us not mourn Sana as if her death was unprecedented or unthinkable. The cancer that led us here is not new and it is not hiding. It has baked into our institutions, families, conversations and media. And it is now convincing us that our grief is enough. Which, for the record, it never was, and it never will be. Have something to add to the story? Share it in the comments below.
