Fateh Sher vs The State

Citation: Jail Petition No. 131 of 2015 (Supreme Court of Pakistan, Appellate Jurisdiction) — decided 9 June 2026.

Background and Facts

On 18 May 2008, in Mohallah Dhorian Wala Mitha, within the jurisdiction of Police Station Mitha Tiwana, District Khushab, a domestic dispute over a daughter’s engagement curdled into a massacre. Fateh Sher, together with five co-accused; Zahoor Ahmad, Ghafoor Ahmad, Muhammad Ramzan, Tanveer Ahmad, and Muhammad Munir, was alleged to have forced entry into the home of Mst. Safia Bibi and, in short order, ended three lives: Safia Bibi herself, her son Wali Ahd Shahzada, and her daughter Mst. Shaheen Kausar. The motive offered by the prosecution was the family’s disapproval of Shaheen Kausar’s engagement to one Mubashir Hayat. FIR No. 133 was registered the same afternoon, invoking Sections 302, 452, 148, and 149 of the Pakistan Penal Code, 1860, read with Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 — a statute whose application would later become the fulcrum of this appeal.

The Trial Court (Sessions Judge/Special Judge, ATA, Sargodha), after a full trial, convicted Fateh Sher on every count and capped his sentence with death under Section 302(b) PPC on three separate counts, alongside a further death sentence under Section 7(a) of the ATA. The High Court at Lahore, sitting in appeal, found no reason to disturb any of it, dismissing the appeal and confirming the death reference. What remained was the petitioner’s last conventional recourse, a Jail Petition before the Supreme Court of Pakistan, heard by a Bench comprising Mr. Justice Muhammad Hashim Khan Kakar, Mr. Justice Salahuddin Panhwar, and Mr. Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim, who authored the judgment.

Worth noting is that the co-accused had already travelled this road before the petitioner. Zahoor Ahmad’s death sentence survived scrutiny all the way up and was carried out. Ghafoor Ahmad’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the High Court. Muhammad Ramzan’s appeal  and subsequent jail petition met the same fate as Zahoor Ahmad’s.

Legal Issues

The Court was, in essence, asked to answer four questions:

1. Did the ocular and medical evidence on record establish, beyond reasonable doubt, the petitioner’s specific and individual role in the killing of Mst. Shaheen Kausar?

2. Did the concurrent findings of guilt by the Trial Court and the High Court disclose any misreading or non-reading of evidence sufficient to justify interference by the apex Court?

3. Did the credibility of eyewitnesses who were close relatives of both the deceased and several of the accused suffer on that account, or did it, paradoxically, strengthen it?

4. Did the facts of the case  fall within the contemplation of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997, or was the invocation of that statute simply a category error?

Arguments Advanced

Counsel for the petitioner, Mr. Hashmat Ali Habib, pressed the defence’s case on familiar but rarely successful terrain: that the eyewitness testimony, having survived cross-examination intact, ought nonetheless to be viewed with suspicion given the dense web of blood relationships connecting witnesses to both victims and accused. The more substantial limb of the petitioner’s case, however, was jurisdictional rather than evidentiary, that whatever the petitioner’s culpability under the Penal Code, the occurrence was a private affair born of wounded family pride, wholly innocent of the terroristic design or intent to spread fear in society that the Anti-Terrorism Act was built to punish. On this narrower point, counsel found firmer footing, anchoring the argument in the Supreme Court’s own larger-Bench pronouncement in Ghulam Hussain’s case (PLD 2020 SC 61).

For the State, the learned Additional Prosecutor General, Mr. Tariq Siddique, together with Mr. Malik Imtiaz Mahal appearing for the complainant, defended the convictions on the strength of consistent ocular evidence corroborated to the letter by the medical findings of Dr. Anjum Naheed (PW-15). It was urged that close relationship to the deceased, far from discrediting the witnesses, made their account more,  not less reliable, since family members confronted with the choice of naming the true killers or shielding them through false implication of strangers have every reason to choose truth over substitution.

Judgment and Reasoning

Writing for the Bench, Mr. Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim decided upon the evidentiary question. The eyewitnesses: Mst. Saira Yasmeen (PW-7) and Rustam Shahzada (PW-8), themselves children of the principal deceased, had named the petitioner with consistency, assigning to him the specific task of cutting Mst. Shaheen Kausar’s throat. The post-mortem findings, cataloguing an incised wound encircling the neck with fractured cervical vertebrae, dovetailed precisely with that account. The Court invoked the long-recognised principle that relatives of the deceased do not, as a rule, let the guilty walk free while implicating the innocent, a presumption of candour earned, here, by the witnesses’ own proximity to loss. Finding no misreading or non-reading of evidence in either of the courts below, the Bench declined to disturb the concurrent findings of guilt, and in doing so dwelt at some length on the manner of the killing itself: three members of one family extinguished within their own home, the female victims dispatched with a method the Court did not shy from calling brutal, leaving in its own assessment no mitigating circumstance capable of softening the sentence.

Yet the Court drew a clean line between condemning the act and accepting every label the prosecution had pinned to it. On the question of the Anti-Terrorism Act, the Bench parted ways with the courts below, holding that an offence born of private enmity over a broken or disapproved engagement, however savage, does not automatically acquire the character of terrorism merely because a dagger and a death were involved. Anchoring itself in the aforementioned case of Ghulam Hussain’s case, the Court reaffirmed that the ATA exists to punish a particular ‘species’ of violence, one calculated to terrorise the public or destabilise the State  and not necessarily every act of domestic or interpersonal savagery that happens to shock the conscience. The conviction and death sentence under Section 7(a) ATA were accordingly set aside, while the conviction and death sentence under Section 302(b) PPC were left undisturbed.

Key Takeaways and Significance

This judgment sits comfortably within a now well-established line of Pakistani jurisprudence that resists the casual over-extension of anti-terrorism law to ordinary, if horrifying, crimes of passion and vendetta. By reaffirming Ghulam Hussain’s insistence on a genuine nexus between the act and the statutory purpose of the ATA, the Court preserved the special statute’s integrity, refusing to let it become a default enhancer of punishment for any crime committed with a weapon and a measure of cruelty.

At the same time, the decision is a textbook restatement of the “interested witness” doctrine in its most defensible form: relationship to the deceased is not, by itself, a mark against credibility, and may in fact be the very reason a witness’s account deserves belief, particularly where naming the guilty means naming one’s own kin. The Court’s treatment of the medical evidence as silent corroborator to oral testimony, and its refusal to find any mitigating factor amid the calculated cruelty of the offence, together illustrate the now-familiar judicial posture toward honour-and-vendetta killings within families: condemnation without exception, but precision in labelling.