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ISLAMABAD: A medical board will evaluate this week Zahir Zakir Jaffer, convicted of the brutal murder of Noor Mukadam, as part of procedural requirements for his mercy petition before Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, a senior jail official said on Monday.

Mukadam, the 27-year-old daughter of a former diplomat, was brutally murdered by Jaffer at his Islamabad residence in July 2021, with investigations confirming she was tortured before being beheaded. A trial court sentenced Jaffer to death in 2022, a verdict later upheld by the Islamabad High Court in 2023.

In May 2025, the Supreme Court also upheld the death penalty, leaving Jaffer with the only option of seeking a presidential pardon under Article 45 of the Constitution, which allows the president to grant clemency by pardoning, reprieving or commuting a sentence.

“The [medical] board is expected to visit Adiala jail within this week, most likely in the next two to three days, to conduct the medical and psychological evaluation of the prisoner,” Jail Superintendent Abdul Ghafoor Anjum told Arab News.

Anjum said he had requested the director of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) for the formation of the medical board after being informed by the convict’s counsel that he intended to file a mercy petition before the president.

“It is entirely a routine matter as whenever a mercy petition is to be filed for any prisoner, we are required to conduct a medical and psychological examination,” he said, adding the matter was being dealt with strictly in accordance with rules.

Officials at Adiala Jail sent two letters, dated July 8 and July 14, to PIMS, requesting the formation of the medical board.

“The appeal of above mentioned Confirmed Condemned Prisoner (Jaffer) was pending at [the] Supreme Court of Pakistan and the same has been dismissed,” read a letter, seen by Arab News.

“Now the mercy petition of [the] subject, cited confirmed condemned prisoner, has to be submitted before the Honourable President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. For that, the medical board and psychiatric board opinion is mandatory,” prison officials said in the letter, requesting PIMS management to schedule Jaffer’s examination within the jail premises.

PIMS constituted the medical board and named Dr. Shafqat Nawaz from the Psychiatry Department and Dr. Amir Naveed from the Neurology Department as its members, according to documents seen by Arab News.

“Following the board’s report, the confirmed condemned prisoner, Jaffer, may proceed to file a mercy petition in accordance with the rules,” Anjum added.

Mukadam and Jaffer, son of a wealthy industrialist, were widely believed to have been in a relationship which they had broken off a few months before her murder. 

Her shocking murder, involving members of the privileged elite of the Pakistani society, triggered an explosive reaction from women’s rights activists reckoning with pervasive violence against women in Pakistan.

It also mounted pressure for a swift conclusion of the trial in a country known to have a sluggish justice system and where cases typically drag on for years.

PESHAWAR: Militants in Pakistan have started using commercially acquired quadcopter drones to drop bombs on security forces in the country’s northwest, police said, a potentially dangerous development in the volatile region.

The use of such drones, which are powered by four rotors allowing for vertical take-off and landing, is worrying the overstretched and under-equipped police force, the frontline against militant attacks, officials said.

Two quadcopters sent by the militants targeted a police station earlier this month, killing a woman and injuring three children in a nearby house in Bannu district, said police officer Muhammad Anwar.

A drone spotted over another police station on Saturday was shot down with assault rifles, he said. It was armed with a mortar shell, he said.

At least eight such drone attacks have targeted police and security forces in Bannu and adjacent areas in the last two and a half months, he said.

Regional police chief Sajjad Khan said militants were still trying to master the use of the drones.

“The militants have acquired these modern tools, but they are in the process of experimentation and that’s why they can’t hit their targets accurately,” he added. The militants are using the quadcopters to drop improvised explosive devices or mortar shells on their targets, five security officials said. They said these explosive devices were packed with ball bearings or pieces of iron.

Provincial police chief Zulfiqar Hameed said the police lacked resources to meet the new challenge.

“We do not have equipment to counter the drones,” he told the local Geo News channel on Sunday. “The militants are better equipped than we are,” he said.

No militant group has claimed responsibility for the drone strikes.

The main militant group operating in the northwest is the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban. But they denied using the drones. “We are trying to acquire this technology,” a TTP spokesman told Reuters.

In 2024, militants carried out 335 countrywide attacks, killing 520 people, according to the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an independent organization.

In recent weeks, thousands of residents from the border region have staged protests, aimed against both the attacks by militants and what they fear is an offensive planned by the army, according to a statement issued by the demonstrators.

They said they feared that a military operation against the militants would displace them from their homes.

A sweeping operation against militants in 2014 was preceded by a forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents. They spent months, and in many cases years, away from their homes.

Pakistan’s army did not respond to a request for comment on whether an operation was planned.