PHOTO: EXPRESS
LAHORE: A bench of the Lahore High Court on Thursday stayed the execution of ‘mentally ill’ prisoner Khizar Hayat until January 30.
Black warrants for his execution, scheduled for January 17, had already been issued. Taking up the petition, Justice Shahid Hameed Dar remarked it would be unjust not to wait for the Supreme Court’s decision in a similar case. The court stayed the execution on a petition filed by of Khizar’s mother Iqbal Bano.
Imdad, another schizophrenic prisoner on death row, was given a last-minute reprieve from execution by the Supreme Court in October 2016. The apex court said it was “inappropriate” to hang someone in such a condition.
An independent special medical board was appointed to evaluate the convict’s mental fitness for execution.
Sentenced to death in 2003 over the shooting of a fellow police officer, Khizar spent nearly 14 years on death row.
During the course of his detention, he faced numerous near-fatal attacks by fellow inmates as he was targeted due to his mental illness, said his counsel Sara Bilal. Since 2012, he has been kept in solitary confinement, she added.
Khizar was first diagnosed as schizophrenia in 2008 by jail authorities. He suffers from delusions and has to be heavily medicated, his mother stated in the petition.
She added he has no idea how long he has been in jail or the reason for being on death row. She believes the medication taken by him is an anti-malarial pill.
Bilal submitted before the court that a petition against the execution of Hayat was pending before the court, which on October 31, sought a reply from the Punjab home department. She said the department was yet to file a response in the case.
District and sessions judge Nazir Ahmed Gajana, on Tuesday, issued the death warrant of 55-year-old Khizar Hayat who was scheduled to be executed on January 17.
Hayat, a former policeman, was convicted in 2003 of murdering one of his peers.
Complainant Muhammad Arif stated in the FIR that he and his brother Ghulam Ghous were going back home on October 21, 2001. That is when the accused, wearing a police uniform, intercepted them.
Hayat was enraged and said he would take revenge from Ghous for insulting him in front of his friends and family over a monetary dispute.
The convict then shot Ghous dead on the spot, the FIR added.
On July 18, 2002, formal charges were framed against Hayat who pleaded not guilty.
On April 2, 2003, the judge awarded a death sentence and imposed a fine of Rs100,000 to be paid to the legal heirs of the deceased.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 13th, 2017.
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