Shafqat death warrants issued for May 6

An anti-terror court (ATC) in Karachi on Friday issued death warrants for murder convict Shafqat Hussain, Express News reported. He is now scheduled to be hanged on May 6.

Shafqat was condemned to death by an ATC in 2004 for killing a seven-year-old boy in 2001. The boy was kidnapped from an apartment building in Karachi where he was working as a guard.

His lawyers claimed that Shafqat was 14 when he was convicted and sentenced to death. The subsequent challenges against his conviction were rejected by the Sindh High Court in 2006 and the Supreme Court in 2007 while the president also rejected his mercy petition in 2012.

Shafqat was scheduled to be hanged on March 19. However, his hanging was stayed for a month by the president after his family purported handed in his birth certificate which showed Shafqat was a juvenile when convicted. A committee recently concluded that Shafqat was not underage at the time of conviction.

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