FAISALABAD: Four Pakistani terror convicts on death row were executed at a jail in Faisalabad today, after the government ended a moratorium on the death penalty earlier this week.
The executed convicts - Zubair Ahmed, Rasheed Qureshi, Ghulam Sarwar Bhatti and Akhlaque Ahmed - had been found guilty in a case related to an attack on former President Pervez Musharraf.
The executions were carried out in a district jail in Faisalabad after strict security measures were put in place.
The government ended the six-year ban on capital punishment for terror-related cases following a brutal terror attack on a school in Peshawar on Tuesday that killed 149 people, mostly children.
Aqil, who uses the name Doctor Usman, was convicted for an attack on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi in 2009. Arshad Mehmood was convicted for his involvement in a 2003 assassination attempt on former president General Pervez Musharraf.
On Thursday, Pakistan's military chief signed death warrants for six terrorists on death row after the government ended the death penalty moratorium on Wednesday.
Pakistan's decision to relinquish a ban on the death penalty in terror-related cases came as the country's political and military leaders vowed to wipe out the homegrown Islamist insurgency following the attack on the army school.
Source:
NDTV, December 21, 2014
Russian citizen executed in Pakistan, officials confirm to embassy
Russian citizen Akhlas Akhlaq has been executed in Pakistan together with three other men, all convicted of attempting to assassinate former President Musharraf, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry confirmed to the Russian Embassy.
Earlier, Russian diplomats, citing Akhlaq’s lawyer, said the execution could be postponed until the arrival of his mother on Monday.
Akhlas Akhlaq is one of five men sentenced to death in Pakistan for a failed plot to assassinate Musharraf. Akhlaq, born in the city of Volgograd to a Russian mother and a Pakistani father, was one of the men arrested following a suicide attack on Gen. Musharraf's convoy on 25 December, 2003. In the assassination attempt, two suicide bombers tried to ram explosives-laden vehicles into the president's limousine. Seventeen people died. Akhlaq denied all charges brought against him.
"The Pakistani authorities intend to execute him [Akhlaq]," a representative of the Russian Embassy in Pakistan, Vadim Zaitsev,
told Sputnik news agency. The death sentence could only be carried out after Akhlaq said his goodbyes to relatives, he added at the time.
"[A police inspector] has informed me that my son will be hanged today in the morning. And they asked me to come immediately to Faisalabad to see him for the last time,” Akhlaq's father, Akhmad said early Sunday morning.
“They took the wrong person,” Akhmad said, adding that he has proved that Pakistani authorities had also charged British nationals by mistake.
For over a decade, the Russian Foreign Ministry tried to work with the Pakistani authorities to resolve the case. The ministry argued that Akhlaq was tried by a military, not civilian court, as required by Pakistani law. Furthermore his trial was closed to the Russian authorities and the public.
Source:
RT, December 21, 2014
