7 more convicted terrorists executed

16 inmates have been hanged since PM lifted moratorium on death penalties.

FAISALABAD/ SUKKUR/ ISLAMABAD/ KARACHI:

Seven convicted terrorists were executed Tuesday morning in four prisons across the country, raising to 16 the number of executions carried out since the prime minister revoked a six-year moratorium on the death penalty in December.

The moratorium was lifted in the aftermath of the December 16 deadly rampage by Taliban gunmen at the Army Public School in Peshawar that left 150 people, mostly schoolchildren, dead.

Officials in four jails in Sukkur, Faisalabad, Karachi and Rawalpindi confirmed that the hangings took place early Tuesday morning amid tight security.

Three convicted militants of the banned sectarian extremist group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), were executed in Central Jail Sukkur. Khalil Ahmed, Muhammad Shahid Hanif and Muhammad Talha were condemned to death by an anti-terrorism court (ATC) in 2003 for murdering the defence ministry director in Karachi, Syed Zafar Ali Shah, in 2001. Their subsequent review petitions and mercy appeals were also rejected.

Similarly, two convicted militants, Mushtaq Ahmed and Nawazish Ali, were executed in the Faisalabad District Jail for a 2003 assassination attempt on former military ruler Pervez Musharraf. Five other convicts in the same case, along with one convict of the GHQ attack case, had already been hanged.

One more militant, Behram Khan, 42 was hanged in the Karachi Central Jail for killing a lawyer, said superintendent Kazi Nazeer Ahmed.

Behram, accompanied by police officer Pir Buksh, had killed Advocate Muhammad Ashraf in the courtroom of the Sindh High Court. Behram was sentenced to death by an ATC in 2003. His appeals were dismissed by the SHC and the SC, while his mercy petition to the president was also rejected in 2012.

According to the police, Behram wanted to kill Qurban Ali Chohan, who was the attorney for a man accused of killing Behram’s uncle. However, Behram and Pir Buksh had never seen the lawyer before and had mistakenly killed Ashraf instead.

Meanwhile an al Qaeda activist, Zulfiqar Ali, was hanged in Rawalpindi’s Adiala jail. He was convicted of killing two policemen during an attack on the US consulate in Karachi in February 2003. Zulfiqar was shifted to the Adiala jail from Karachi in November 2014. On January 3, the ATC in Karachi had issued his black warrants.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 14^th, 2015.