The Sindh High Court has rejected the appeals of two men sentenced to death in the Baldia factory case.

Mohammad Zubair aka Charya and Abdul Rehman aka Bhola had appealed against the death sentence handed down to them in 2020 on charges of arson.

The convicts had maintained that allegations of extortion were baseless.

More than 250 people had been killed after a fire in the Ali Enterprise factory in Karachi’s Baldia Town in 2012. Initially thought to be an accident, investigations revealed that the factory had been set on fire after the owners failed to pay extortion money.

Four people, Shahrukh Latif, Ali Muhammad, Arshad Mehmood and Fazal Ahmed, had been awarded life imprisonment sentences for abetting the crime.

Over 400 witnesses gave their testimony in the case which established that Hammad Siddiqui, an MQM official, had ordered that the building be set on fire.

However, other MQM office holders, including Rauf Siddiqui, who was a provincial minister at the time of the incident, were acquitted.