The death sentence on Rehmat Shah Afridi, chief editor...

The death sentence on Rehmat Shah Afridi, chief editor of the Frontier Post,was reduced to life imprisonment by a court in Lahore, Pakistan, which ruled that the drug trafficking charge for which he had been convicted did not warrant capital punishment.
Afridi had been arrested on April 12, 1999, after his car was stopped and 20 kg of hashish found in it. He denied the drug charges and maintained he was framed for criticising the government of then prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
An anti-narcotics court had sentenced Afridi to death on July 21, 2001. Afridi's case had been the first in Pakistan in which videotapes were accepted as evidence. The tapes, recorded by the Anti Narcotics Force (ANF), showed Afridi apparently making deals to sell drugs to customers.
Prosecutor Khawaja Sultan Ahmad contended the video proved Afridi was meeting undercover agents who were trying to make a deal with him to buy drugs. In the video, Afridi was seen offering a pack of cigarettes to another person.
The ANF lawyer said he was actually showing a sample of hashish to an undercover agent. A voice purported to be that of Afridi also suggested that he would never deal in dangerous drugs such as heroin because they had killed hundreds of youths.
Ahmad pointed out that Afridi did not say that he would not deal in hashish. Afridi's lawyer raised several objections to the video, saying it was of poor quality and the voices could also not be made out.
The lawyer said the videos were never subjected to sonographic tests, did not display the time or date and that the law in Pakistan and in many other countries did not accept video and videocassettes in evidence.
He also said that undercover agents or videocassettes were not mentioned in the police report made after Afridi's arrest. According to Afridi's lawyer, a video could be used as evidence only if it was of excellent quality, the person making the video appeared in court as a witness and the lip movement of the people shown in the video synchronised with the voice in the video.
He maintained that the video produced against Afridi did not fulfil any of these conditions and, therefore, had no value.