KARACHI: A sessions court has sentenced a woman to life in prison for killing her husband with the connivance of a co-accused and staging it as a suicide in 2019.

The co-accused has been sentenced to death for murdering the man by strangulation and electrocution.

The additional district and sessions judge (West), found Asma, and her accomplice Ghulam Nabi alias Deedar, guilty of killing Shah Zaman in their house within the jurisdiction of the Peerabad police station in 2019.

The accused failed to establish their plea of defence, while the prosecution corroborated its case through witnesses, including eyewitnesses who were present at the scene when the accused committed the murder by “giving electric shocks to the deceased, due to which he succumbed to death at the spot,” the judge observed.

Her co-accused sentenced to death

The court also directed the accused persons to pay Rs500,000 each as compensation to the legal heirs of the deceased person.

In the detailed verdict, the court reproduced the wife’s confessional statement before the magistrate.

She testified that she wanted to get rid of her husband and had no option but to kill him, for which she sought the help of the co-accused, who provided her with sleeping pills.

She confessed that on the night of the incident, she mixed the pills into her husband’s glass of milk. Once he fell asleep, she called the co-accused, who arrived at the house and used a wire to electrocute and strangle him.

According to state prosecutor Syed Athar Hussain, the complainant informed the police that on November 5, 2019, he received a call from his cousin, who told him that Shah Zaman had died of an electric shock and that his body was being taken to Jacobabad.

However, upon inspecting the body, the complainant noticed scars on the wrists, chest, feet, ankles, and neck of the deceased. He then decided to shift the body to Karachi for a post-mortem at the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital. The post-mortem report confirmed that the deceased had died due to “strangulation and electric shock”.

Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2025