By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court of Pakistan on Wednesday threw out the convictions of two men sentenced to death for their alleged roles in the 2012 Baldia Town factory fire in Karachi — a blaze that killed more than 260 garment workers and stands as the deadliest industrial disaster in the country’s history — ruling that prosecutors had failed to establish their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The acquittals of Abdul Rehman, known by the alias Bhola, and Zubair, known as Chariya — both identified as workers of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement political party — close one of the most consequential chapters of a case that has wound through Pakistan’s courts for over a decade, implicating politicians, factory owners and a political organization once among the most powerful in Karachi.
A three-judge bench led by Justice Malik Shahzad Ahmed, and including Justices Aqeel Ahmed Abbasi and Shakeel Ahmad, accepted the men’s appeals and set aside death sentences that had originally been handed down in September 2020 by an anti-terrorism court on charges of murder, extortion, arson and terrorism. The court indicated a detailed written judgment would follow.
The fire broke out on the morning of Sept. 11, 2012, at the Ali Enterprises garment factory, a multi-storey building in Baldia Town on the outskirts of Karachi. Three of the factory’s gates were locked at the time of the blaze. Iron grills covered the windows. Workers with nowhere to escape burned inside. Of the more than 260 who died, 16 could never be identified.
Prosecutors alleged that the fire was set deliberately — the culmination of an extortion scheme in which MQM operatives had demanded “bhattaa,” or protection money, from the factory’s owner, Abdul Aziz Bhaila, in July 2012. When the demand went unmet, the prosecution contended, the building was torched two months later. Both Bhola, described as a former sector in-charge within the party’s organizational structure, and Chariya were accused of carrying out the attack.
But the case against them was built on a foundation the Supreme Court found to be riddled with evidentiary problems.
Senior counsel Farogh Naseem, arguing on behalf of the two men, told the bench that neither had been named in the original First Information Report filed after the fire. Their names emerged only after a Joint Investigation Team was constituted by the Sindh provincial government in 2015 — more than two and a half years after the incident — acting on information provided by a man named Mohammad Rizwan Qureshi. Naseem argued that the JIT report was neither legally admissible as evidence nor a permissible basis for imposing a death sentence or life imprisonment.
Qureshi himself was never produced as a witness in court, Naseem said, and was not listed as an accused by prosecutors. His account, on which the entire JIT report rested, was recorded nine months after the fire. No CCTV footage was presented, no independent witness was called to corroborate the extortion allegation, and no case or complaint about the alleged bhattaa demand had been filed by police or the factory’s owners from the date of the fire until 2013, when Qureshi was arrested, the appeals argued.
The defense also pointed to the absence of a forensic report from Karachi University’s Science Laboratory that the prosecution had indicated would establish that an accelerant or chemical substance was used to start the fire. No such report was ever placed in the record.
Justice Shahzad, during the hearing, noted that a confessional statement existed for Chariya but not for Bhola, and pressed prosecutors on why the state had not challenged the acquittals of other co-accused in the case if the extortion demand had indeed been made by the party. “Had there been a demand of extortion by MQM, why was the acquittal of the other co-accused not challenged?” he asked from the bench.
Naseem argued that the accepted legal principle — that when doubt exists, it must be resolved in favor of the accused — applied with particular force here, given that the Sindh High Court had itself extended the benefit of the doubt to other defendants in the same case. The bench agreed.
The court also declined to allow relatives of the deceased workers to be formally joined as parties to the appeal. Justice Shahzad said that granting such a request could open the door to hundreds of similar applications.
The Sindh High Court had in 2023 upheld the death sentences for both men, rejecting their appeals and simultaneously setting aside a life sentence imposed on four factory employees. The SHC had also declined to hear a government appeal against the acquittal of Rauf Siddiqui, who was then Sindh’s provincial minister for commerce and industries, and three others whom the anti-terrorism court had cleared of charges.
With Wednesday’s ruling, a separate petition filed by the MQM seeking to have observations critical of the party struck from lower court records was declared moot. Because the underlying judgments had been set aside, Justice Shahzad ruled, the contested remarks no longer carried any legal force.
What endures is the fire itself — and the question of who bears responsibility for the deaths of more than 260 workers trapped behind locked gates and iron-barred windows on a September morning thirteen years ago. The factory’s owner and his sons, Arshad and Shahid Bhaila, were identified in court arguments as having failed to provide adequate emergency exits. Beyond that, the case leaves the question of criminal accountability for one of South Asia’s worst industrial disasters largely unresolved.
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