Pakistan on Saturday issued orders to hang 6 more militants, official said, the latest in a wave of executions in the wake of the Peshawar school massacre, which claimed 149 lives in the country's deadliest terror attack.
Among the 6 is Shafqat Hussain, who was 15 when he was sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of a 7-year-old boy in 2004, officials said.
"The courts have issued death warrants for 7 convicts," the prison department home secretary in southern Sindh province Nawaz Shaikh told AFP.
"Prisoners Shahid Hanif and Khalil Ahmed convicted for killing government official on sectarian grounds, Zulfiqar Ali for killing 22 policemen deputed at the US Consulate in Karachi and Behram Khan for killing a young lawyer will be hanged on January 13, while Shahfaq Hussain will be executed for killing a child on January 14," Shaikh said.
"2 others, Talha and Saeed, will be given capital punishment for sectarian killings on January 15," he added.
Rights groups in the country have opposed Hussain's conviction and sentence saying he should have been tried in a juvenile court and not been given the death penalty, which cannot be imposed on minors in Pakistan.
Pakistan ended its 6-years-old moratorium on the death penalty in terror cases last month in the wake of the slaughter at an army-run school in the northwestern city of Peshawar on December 16.
Heavily-armed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) gunmen murdered 149 people, 133 of them schoolchildren, in the attack, which shocked the world and brought promises of swift and decisive action by the government and military.
7 convicted militants have been hanged so far since the de facto ban on capital punishment ended. 6 of those executed were found guilty of trying to assassinate then-military dictator Musharraf in Rawalpindi in 2003 and the 7th was sentenced in connection with a 2009 attack on the army headquarters.
Pakistani officials have said they plan to hang 500 convicts in the coming weeks, drawing protest from international human rights campaigners.
The United Nations, European Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called on Pakistan to re-impose its moratorium on the death penalty.
Rights campaigners say Pakistan overuses its anti-terror laws and courts to prosecute ordinary crimes.
Source: Agence France-Presse, January 3, 2015
Terrorism-related cases: SC to take up appeals of condemned militants
The Supreme Court will take up next week over a dozen appeals of militants condemned to death by courts under the Anti-Terrorism Act 1997.
The appeals filed by death-row prisoners against their convictions by anti-terrorism courts will be taken up by 2 separate 3-judge benches of the apex court headed by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa and Justice Mian Saqib Nisar.
This comes over a week after an extraordinary huddle of the top judiciary decided to give priority to terrorism-related cases. Chief Justice of Pakistan Nasirul Mulk had convened the meeting in the aftermath of the December 16 massacre of children at the Army Public School in Peshawar.
The meeting had decided that the registrar offices of the Supreme Court and high courts would bifurcate appeals between militancy-related and other cases so that cases in the first category could be taken up on a priority basis.
Most of the appeals to be taken up by the 2 benches next week have been pending before the top court since 2005. It has been learnt that around 250 appeals against convictions by ATCs have been pending before the SC.
On January 8, the Justice Khosa-led bench will take up 2 appeals of militants condemned to death by military courts. Col (retd) Muhammad Akram, the counsel for Gunner Muhammad Mushtaq, told The Express Tribune that his client had been awarded the death penalty by a military court in 2004 but he was not allowed to hire a counsel of his own choosing.
Akram said that in 2006 he had challenged the military court's verdict in the apex court which had accepted his plea for a regular hearing - but it was never taken up. Akram criticised former chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry for delaying hearing on such appeals during his tenure in the Supreme Court.
Lawyer Chaudhry Faisal Hussain said it was unfortunate that instead of disposing of the appeals of convicted militants, the former chief justice had spent time on self projection.
The Justice Khosa-led bench will also take up a number of appeals of death-row prisoners convicted by civilian courts.
Similarly, a larger bench of the Supreme Court will take up the matter related to determining the fate of over 8,000 death-row prisoners across the country in the 3rd week of January.
Source: The Express Tribune, January 3, 2015
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