No reprieve: Saulat Mirza to be hanged on April 1

ATC reissues death warrants for notorious killer.

KARACHI: The death warrants for notorious killer Saulat Ali Khan aka Saulat Mirza were reissued on Tuesday after a 72-hour stay on his execution expired.

An anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Karachi directed the Mach jail authorities to hang the death row convict on April 1 at 5:30am.

Mirza was to be executed on March 19 but hours before the hanging, his video with some explosive confessions was leaked to the media, resulting in a temporary stay. While jail officials claimed the execution was delayed owing to health reasons, speculations were rife that the government was planning to commute the death penalty into a life term and to make Mirza a state witness.

An activist of Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), Mirza was handed down capital punishment in 1999 for killing then Karachi Electricity Supply Company’s managing director Malik Shahid Hamid along with his driver and guard in 1997. In the recently leaked video, Mirza claimed that he had carried out the murder on the orders of MQM chief Altaf Hussain received through another party leader Babar Ghauri.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar had justified the stay on Mirza’s execution on health grounds, claiming he was not well enough to be hanged.

The fresh death warrants, which were sought by the Mach jail authorities on Saturday, stated Mirza would be executed after completing all the legal formalities in the presence of a judicial magistrate.

A court official said that no plea or letter had been received to reopen the case or commute the sentence.

Shafqat Hussain case

The execution of Shafqat Hussain, who is said to have been sentenced as a juvenile in 2004, has been stayed for another 30 days after an initial 72-hour reprieve.

Karachi jail authorities informed an ATC on Tuesday that the interior ministry had put off the execution and his case would now be scrutinised. The convict might undergo some DNA tests also to ascertain his actual age.

Hussain, sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing a seven-year-old boy, was recently saved from the gallows hours before his hanging after a birth certificate showing his birth date on October 1, 1991, was presented before the media.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 25^th, 2015.