The Peshawar High Court on Thursday commuted the death sentence of the main culprit Imran Khan convicted for the 2017 lynching and murder of Mashal Khan and converted it into a life sentence. The convict had filed an appeal for the reduction of the sentence with the court.

The Peshawar also declared the acquittal of 25 accused in the case void and directed the authorities to arrest them. The verdict was announced by a two-member bench comprising Justice Lal Jan Khattak and Justice Atiq Shah.

The Peshawar High Court upheld the three-year sentence of the accused, seven convictions of life imprisonment, and punishments given to the rest of the accused. The government and Mashal’s father had filed appeals against the ATC verdicts. The Peshawar High Court dismissed all other appeals in the case.

The verdict was reserved in September after the bench conducted marathon hearings for seven days in dozens of appeals filed by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, Mashal’s father Mohammad Iqbal Khan, and 33 of the convicts.

Mashal Khan murder case:

Mashal Khan was a 23-year-old student of the Department of Mass Communication at Mardan's Abdul Wali Khan University. He was brutally lynched and murdered by a mob over a false allegation of blasphemy, on April 13, 2017.