Pakistani man's execution postponed for fourth time
|
Version 0 of 1. A Pakistani man at the centre of an international campaign to spare him from the death penalty had his execution postponed for the fourth time on Tuesday, just hours before he was due to be hanged. Shafqat Hussain has been on death row since 2004 when he was sentenced for kidnapping and killing a seven-year-old boy. But in the early hours of Tuesday morning, he won yet another last-minute stay following a campaign by rights activists who say Hussain was a minor at the time and was beaten by police into making a false confession. “We were ready for the execution today but now we have postponed following the order of the court,” said Qazi Naseer Ahmed, the superintendent of Karachi central jail. “All the arrangements were made to execute him at 4am.” Despite the previous delays, his lawyer, Tariq Hassan, said Hussain and his family had given up hope. “He was in a state of fear and ate nothing for the whole night,” he said. The latest delay follows the supreme court’s decision to set up a three-judge bench to scrutinise a case that no other court has been prepared to throw out. Lawyers from the Justice Project Pakistan, a human rights law firm, have cast doubts over Hussain’s conviction, with claims he was tortured by police into implicating himself. They also claim Hussain was only 14 at the time of the killing of the seven-year-old boy in Karachi. Under Pakistani law children cannot be sentenced to death. Rather than being examined by a juvenile court, Hussain was tried under special laws in an anti-terrorism court designed to deliver faster convictions than Pakistan’s regular judicial system. Activists have argued a recent inquiry by the Federal Investigation Agency that found he was an adult at the time of the crime only “selectively considered facts” over Hussain’s age and that officials suppressed key documents, such as his school record. Hussain’s execution became imminent after he was caught up in the national crackdown against terrorism that followed the 16 December massacre of more than 130 boys at a school in the city of Peshawar by Pakistani Taliban gunmen. Related: Pakistani school attackers ‘were told to kill soldiers’ after massacre of pupils One of the government’s first actions after the attack was to scrap an informal death penalty moratorium pushed on the country by western powers. In a country with a weak criminal justice system and the largest death row in the world, the decision led to the fast-tracking of cases that often had nothing to do with Islamist terrorism. At least 150 people have been executed in recent months, according to Amnesty International, which said: “Pakistan is fast turning into one of the world’s top executioners.” Senior international officials, including a delegation of EU diplomats, have lobbied the Pakistani government to review the case. Four senior UN experts have also warned Pakistan that going ahead with the execution “would be utterly unacceptable and in flagrant contravention of Pakistan’s national and international obligations”. |