Pakistan: Woman school principal, who claimed to be prophet, gets death sentence

Lahore: A sessions court in Lahore has handed down the death penalty to a Muslim woman on blasphemy charges, a news report said.

The woman, owner and principal of a private school, was accused of distributing photocopies of her writings wherein she denied the finality of prophethood and claimed herself as a prophet, Dawn reported.

Handing down the judgment on Monday, Additional District & Sessions Judge Mansoor Ahmad Qureshi in his 22-page verdict, said the accused failed to prove that her case falls within Section 84 of the Pakistan Penal Code, which deals with offences committed by a person of unsound mind.

Nishtar Colony police had registered the FIR on September 2, 2013 against the woman on the complaint of Qari Iftikhar Ahmad Raza, a prayer leader of a local mosque.

The woman’s counsel, Mian Muhammad Ramzan, had argued that she was of unsound mind at the time of occurrence. He said the magistrate concerned had ordered mental examination of the woman, which remained pending without any fault on the part of the suspect.

The defence counsel further argued that the comparison of writing from photocopies was not possible as tampering had been made in the photocopies of the alleged documents.

A state prosecutor, Sadia Arif, assisted by Advocate Ghulam Mustafa Chaudhry, the counsel for the complainant, submitted before the court that the prosecution proved its case on the basis of oral and documentary evidence.

She said the suspect failed to prove that at the time of writing and distributing blasphemous material she was incapable of knowing the nature of her act.

The prosecution presented 11 witnesses including the complainant and police officials.

The judge, after going through the statements of the witnesses and their cross examination, observed that the oral and material evidence proved beyond reasonable doubt that the suspect wrote and distributed the writings attributed to her.

The judge noted that a report of a medical board of the Punjab Institute of Mental Health termed the suspect fit to stand trial.

The judge remarked that the record showed that the woman was running her school single-handedly till her arrest. Therefore, the woman could not be stated to be suffering from legal insanity.

The judge further observed that it was evident that the suspect was not free from abnormality, otherwise, she would not have written and distributed such derogatory material.

The judge ruled that the law in the country did not recognise such lesser forms of mental abnormality and the plea of diminished responsibility was not available as a defence in a criminal prosecution.

The verdict found beyond any doubt that the suspect woman wrote and distributed the derogatory writings and failed to prove that she suffered from mental illness.

“The convict Salma Tanveer is sentenced to death and fine Rs50,000 u/s 295-C PPC,” said the verdict. (UNI)