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The Supreme Court has fixed the hearing of Zahir Jaffer\u2019s review plea in the Noor Mukadam murder case<\/a> for Wednesday, April 8.<\/p>\n Noor, aged 27 years, was found murdered at Zahir\u2019s Islamabad residence in July 2021, with the probe revealing she was tortured<\/u><\/a> by him before being beheaded. Zahir\u2019s death sentence<\/u><\/a> by the trial court had already been upheld<\/u><\/a> by the Islamabad High Court (IHC), but he had sought a review of the verdict in July of last year.<\/p>\n The convict, Zahir, seeks a review of his conviction in the 2021 murder case.<\/p>\n In a cause list published online by the SC on Saturday, the date for Zahir\u2019s hearing was fixed for April 8.<\/p>\n The 47-page review petition was filed by Advocate Khawaja Haris on behalf of Zahir under Article 188<\/a> of the Constitution (review of judgments or orders by SC). The state and Noor\u2019s father, Shaukat Ali Muqadam, were made the respondents.<\/p>\n The petition contended that the issue of Zahir\u2019s alleged \u201cunsoundness of mind or mental capacity\u201d that was raised before the SC in an application had not been addressed and was \u201cgiven short shrift\u201d.<\/p>\n On the rape charges, the review plea argued that it was \u201capparent from the record that there is no evidence on the record in proof of this allegation\u201d.<\/p>\n The SC had commuted Zahir\u2019s death sentence on the rape charge to life imprisonment, as decided by the trial court<\/a>, but did not acquit him of it. While he was acquitted of the 10-year sentence for kidnapping, a one-year term was handed down for wrongful confinement under Section 342<\/a> of the Pakistan Penal Code, according to the SC verdict.<\/p>\n Zahir\u2019s review plea argued that the video recordings, based on which the SC upheld the death sentence, had not been proved during the trial and were not provided to any of the accused.<\/p>\n It said the apex court ruling was extensively based on video recordings stored in a digital video recorder (DVR) and on clips that the prosecution said were transferred from the DVR to a hard disk, providing the \u201cmost essential link in the chain of circumstances\u201d on which the SC gave its verdict.<\/p>\n The SC, in its detailed verdict<\/u><\/a>, had stressed the significance of digital evidence by declaring that footage can be admissible as primary evidence under the \u201csilent witness theory\u201d \u2014 a rule of evidence that allows for photog\u00adr\u00ada\u00ad\u00adphic video or other recorded evidence to be admitted as substantive proof of what it depicts, without the need for an eyewitness\u2019s testimony.<\/p>\n Noor was found murdered at a residence in Islamabad\u2019s upscale Sector F-7\/4 on July 20, 2021. A first information report (FIR) was registered later the same day against Jaffer, who was arrested at the site of the murder.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 co-accused in the case \u2014 were each sentenced to 10 years in prison.<\/p>\n Zahir\u2019s parents, leading businessman Zakir Jaffer and Asmat Adamji, had been indicted<\/a> by an Islamabad district and sessions court in October 2021 but were later acquitted<\/a> by the court.<\/p>\n