Pak man gets 18 years jail for hurling shoe at judge

A Pakistani man has been sentenced to 18 years in jail by an anti-terrorism court for hurling shoe at a judge, the first such sentence in the country's history.

The convict Ijaz Ahmed, a resident of Muzaffargarh, about 400 km from Lahore, had hurled a shoe on senior civil judge Zahid Qayyum during a hearing on March 20.

Ijaz, an undertrial suspect in a robbery case, threw the shoe while complaining that he was being languished in the jail despite bail but was not being released due to absence of written release orders.

After the incident, Ahmed was booked under terrorism and other sections of the Pakistan Penal Code.

ATC Judge Khalid Mehmood Malik also imposed a fine of Rs 3 million on the convict.

Meanwhile, a former seminary student who hurled a shoe at Pakistan's ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif in March in Lahore was released from prison on bail after withdrawing terrorism charges from the FIR.

According to the counsel of the accused, his client did not belong to any political party nor had any political motive.