PAKISTAN: SHC UPHOLDS DEATH SENTENCE OF TWO BROTHERS IN PIDC BLAST CASE

April 11, 2020:

The Sindh High Court on 9 April 2020 upheld the death sentence of two brothers and overturned the death penalty of a co-accused in the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) bomb blast case in Karachi.
The two-judge bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha observed that the judicial confessions of both brothers, Mangla Khan and Aziz Khan, were made voluntarily and two eyewitnesses had also identified them for parking a car at the crime site in which the bomb was planted.
However, it noted that the case of co-accused Abdul Hameed Bugti was on a different footing since there was no other corroborative evidence to support the statement of an eyewitness against him.
An anti-terrorism court had sentenced Mangla Khan and Aziz Khan to death in May 2007 for masterminding and carrying out a bomb blast outside the PIDC building in November 2005 that had left four people dead and 21 others wounded. The ATC had also handed down multiple terms, including life term, to both convicts.
Hameed Bugti was arrested a month after the conviction of the two brothers and after holding his trial separately, the trial court had sentenced him also to death in June 2014 in the same case.
According to the prosecution, on 15 November 2005 a powerful blast ripped through the ground floor of the PIDC House, a multi-storied building also housing the offices of the Pakistan Petroleum Limited. Initially, the two brothers were arrested in Gulshan-i-Iqbal on a tip-off and they confessed to having carried out the bomb blast on the instruction of the late leader of Jamhoori Watan Party Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti to ‘punish’ the PPL for “not recruiting the local youth of Balochistan,” it said.