#Presumed guilty

Narrated Burayd ibn Mu'awiya

I asked Abu Abd Allah [Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq] about the qasama [collective oath]. He said: "In all claims, proof lies with the claimant and the oath with the accused, except in cases of blood. While the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) was at Khaybar, the Ansar missed one of their men and found him killed. The Ansar said: 'So-and-so the Jew killed our companion.' The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said to the claimants: 'Produce two just men from outside your group and I will hand him over to you for retaliation. If you cannot find two witnesses, produce a qasama of fifty men and I will hand him over to you for retaliation.' They said: 'O Messenger of Allah, we have no two witnesses from outside our group, and we would hate to swear to what we did not see.' So the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) paid the blood money himself, and said: 'The blood of Muslims is protected by the qasama, so that when a wicked sinner sees an opportunity against his enemy, the fear of being killed for it through the qasama holds him back and he refrains from killing him.' [...]"