Sentencing of pair from wealthy families seen as victory for justice against Karachi's super-rich and landowning class
Two men from wealthy Pakistani families have been sentenced to death for the killing of a Karachi police officer's son, delighting campaigners who said the murder symbolised the once unchallengeable power of the country's elite.
At a hearing in the city's anti-terrorism court, Shahrukh Jatoi and Siraj Talpur were told they would be executed for their role in the killing of Shahzeb Khan last year. Two other men, including Talpur's brother Sajjad, were given life sentences.
The 20-year-old Khan was shot dead in December last year after being chased through the streets of one of Karachi's richest neighbourhoods. It followed a late-night altercation with the servant of Khan's neighbour who had verbally abused Khan's sister after she returned home.
"The death penalty is absolutely the right thing," said Umer Mukhtar, a friend of Khan's who set up a Facebook campaign demanding justice. "All of them should be hanged in public, in the same place where they brutally killed my friend."
In a city where violence and gangland murders are a fact of daily life, the killing of the clean-cut university student fuelled the anger of Karachi's increasingly assertive middle classes fed up with landowners and the super-rich who are regarded as a spoilt, unaccountable elite.
The Jatoi family are major industrialists, owning construction companies and a television station. The Talpurs are landowners in Karachi's rural hinterland, part of a class of "feudals" that many Pakistanis believe still wield too much power.
Jatoi is said to have confronted Khan at the block of flats in the Defence Housing Association after Khan had complained about the treatment of his sister by a man working for the Talpurs.
The two men shared a flat where they entertained on the 11th floor of the building, directly next to where the Khan family lived.
Although Khan's father, Aurangzeb, a senior police officer, succeeded in defusing the row, the argument flared up again in the car park when Shahzeb Khan went to park his car. Jatoi is said to have fired shots in the air, before pursuing Khan through the streets. He died in the car, which crashed and overturned.
At the time the politician Imran Khan said the case was a "classic example of how our ruling elite violates laws", including murder.
Popular anger increased when it emerged that Jatoi had left the country on a fake passport despite being put on an exit control list. Footage from Karachi airport showed him being escorted through security controls by unidentified men.
He surrendered in Dubai after his father was arrested outside Pakistan's supreme court, where he was appearing in connection with a major corruption scandal involving energy companies.
Mukhtar said allies of the accused had tried hard to derail the case, which involved key witnesses retracting their statements and death threats being made to campaigners who had publicised the issue.
He said the case had only come to trial because of a social media campaign and protests by middle-class young people. It forced Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the activist chief justice, to take an interest in the case. "In Pakistan there was never really hope for justice before this case," he said.