TAXILA: A court sentenced a local journalist to one year in jail and fined Rs50,000 for publishing a defamatory news against three people, including a former bureaucrat.

Meer Asim Mehmood, the editor of an Urdu newspaper, had published a report in May 2015 over alleged tampering of land record and illegal occupation of land by the three people.

The three filed a petition in the court of additional sessions judge Taxila.

On Wednesday, Additional Sessions Judge Naveed Raza Bukhari announced the verdict. The court also sentenced a man to two years` imprisonment at whose behest the news had been published.