Onlykashmir.in News Desk
A court in Ramban has sentenced Mohammad Sharief to two life terms for his role in a July 2005 militant attack in Gool that killed three members of a family, including an infant, bringing a long-running murder case to a conclusion at the trial-court level, more than two decades after the incident.
Principal Sessions Judge Ajay Kumar Gupta also imposed fines totalling Rs 2 lakh and awarded additional 10-year rigorous imprisonment terms for offences relating to attempted murder and violations of the Arms Act. All the sentences will run concurrently.
The attack took place on July 27, 2005, and targeted the family of Rashid Bohra. Three members of the family were killed, while others sustained serious injuries. Sharief was arrested in 2019, many years after the incident. His alleged accomplice, Shabir Ahmed, died in 2006.
The defence had argued that there were inconsistencies in the accounts of eyewitnesses and that there had been delays in recording their statements. The court rejected both arguments. It held that the testimony of the injured eyewitnesses was reliable and supported by medical and other evidence.
The judge observed that human testimony cannot be expected to reproduce an event with photographic precision, adding that minor discrepancies do not automatically undermine a witness’s credibility when the essential facts remain consistent. The observation reflects a settled approach in criminal trials, where courts look for the core of a witness’s account rather than demanding exact detail on every point, particularly when the events occurred in moments of terror.
The court also accepted that the delay in recording statements was explained by the severity of the survivors’ injuries. One eyewitness had sustained six bullet wounds and remained unconscious for seven days, while another had suffered around 15 to 16 bullet injuries and was also unconscious for about a week. In such circumstances, the court found, the timing of the statements did not weaken their credibility.
The verdict brings a measure of closure to a family that suffered a devastating loss in the attack, in which an infant was among those killed. Cases from the years of militancy have often taken long to reach a conclusion because of the difficulty in tracing accused persons, gathering evidence and securing testimony after the passage of time. The sentencing at the trial level shows that such cases can still be pursued to conviction, and it underlines the importance of the evidence given by survivors who carried the memory of the attack for twenty-one years.
