Justice Ali Baqar Najafi, who is now part of the Federal Constitutional Court, has observed that the Noor Mukadam case is the direct result of a “vice” spreading in society known as “living relationship”, it emerged on Wednesday.
It appeared the judge was referring to a live-in relationship, where two unmarried individuals in a romantic relationship cohabitate.
Noor, aged 27 years, was found murdered at the Islamabad residence of Zahir Zakir Jaffer in July 2021. In May, a three-judge SC bench, led by Justice Hashim Kakar and including Justices Ishtiaq Ibrahim and Najafi, had upheld the death sentence awarded to Zahir, who was convicted by an Islamabad trial court in 2022.
Last month, the apex court had taken up Zakir’s review petition challenging the capital punishment awarded to him. During the hearing, Justice Ali Baqar Najafi told senior counsel Khawaja Haris Ahmed, representing the convict, that it would be more appropriate for him to start arguments after going through the additional note he had not yet issued at the time.
Subsequently, Justice Najafi was sworn in as a judge of the newly established FCC.
In an additional note on the Noor murder case, which surfaced today, Justice Najafi, while upholding the sentence awarded to Zahir, observed that “the present case is a direct result of a vice spreading in the upper society which we know as ‘living relationship’”.
He stressed that such relationships ignored “societal compulsions” and “defy not only the law of the land but also the personal law” under Sharia.
Justice Najafi went on to say that engaging in a relationship like that was a “direct revolt against Almighty Allah,” calling on the younger generation to note its “horrible consequences, such as in the present case, which is also a topic for the social reformist to discuss in their circles”.
Justice Najafi further said that in his view, “no mitigating circumstances existed in the present case.
He noted that the “minor discrepancies in the time of occurrence, the delay in postmortem, absence of the finger prints on the knife but matched with the DNA of the petitioner, minor delay in lodging the first information would not affect the credibility of the prosecution evidence, which had circumstantial evidence.”
“One end of the rope is found tied with the dead body of Noor Mukadam, and the other end tied with the neck of the petitioner,” he said.
The case
Noor was found murdered at a residence in Islamabad’s upscale Sector F-7/4 on July 20, 2021. A first information report was registered later the same day against Zahir, who was arrested at the site of the murder.
In February 2022, a district and sessions judge sentenced Jaffer to death for the murder and handed him 25 years of rigorous imprisonment, finding him guilty of rape. His household staff, Mohammad Iftikhar and Jan Mohammad — co-accused in the case — were each sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Zahir’s parents, leading businessman Zakir Jaffer and Asmat Adamji, were indicted by an Islamabad district and sessions court in October 2021 but were later acquitted by the court.
Six officials of Therapy Works, whose employees had visited the site of the murder before police, were also among those indicted by the lower court but were later freed of the charges along with the parents.
According to the challan, the parents and the therapy workers tried to conceal the crime and attempted to destroy the evidence.
In March 2023, the Islamabad High Court (IHC), dismissing Zahir’s appeal against the conviction, not only upheld the death sentence but also converted his 25-year jail term into another death penalty. The IHC had also rejected the pleas of the main suspect’s staff challenging their conviction.
The next month, Zahir approached the SC against the IHC verdict, insisting that his conviction resulted from “erroneous appreciation” of the case evidence and that the high court and trial court could not identify the “fundamental flaws” in the FIR.
In May of this year, the SC upheld the death sentence of Zahir for the murder of Noor.
