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Published 02 Dec, 2021 01:17pm

Zahir Jaffer's mental illness plea stirs Twitter

Twitter users expressed anger and disappointment in the justice system after Zahir Jaffer, the main accused in the Noor Mukadam murder case, pleaded mental illness on Wednesday.

“Zahir Jaffer. Remember the name. Our judiciary took so much time to sentence him for a proved crime, that he has systematically set the grounds to plead insanity,” wrote Twitter user Aimen Ayaz.

“This is why it was important for justice to be served fast,” she added.

The plea has come after four months of the brutal murder and the arrest of the suspect.

Jaffer’s counsel Sikandar Zulqarnain submitted a petition that claims that his client was “mentally ill.” It states that Jaffer suffers from schizophrenia due to drug usage and was in the same state of mind the day of the murder.

Official Twitter profile of the Justice for Noor campaign responded to the plea and raised the question that how can a person who was the chief brand strategist of a family business and therapist who counselled children be mentally ill.

The mental illness plea has some people speculating what this could mean for the murder case.

Twitter user Maryam S. Khan said, “So the unsoundness of mind plea is that he doesn't even understand the nature of the proceedings or charges against him, and can't sign off on any documents.”

“In other words he's not even fit to undergo trial! Quite something huh!” she added.

Trying to make sense of the situation, a user responded to Khan’s tweet and said, “Doesn’t the well established fact that he has provided cogent arguments through which to implicate his parents himself and leveraging that to somehow be exonerated demonstrate that far from being insane his illness is violent sociopathy and those dudes are the ones you put away?”

During the last two hearings Zahir Jaffer was kicked out of the courtroom for unruly conduct and behaving disruptively, to which his mother Ismat Adamjee had responded that the “court knows about her son’s condition.”

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