Pakistan Executes Two Terrorists After Lifting
Moratorium on Death Penalty
ISLAMABAD: Two terrorists were today hanged in Pakistan in the
first executions since 2008, officials said, after the government ended a
moratorium on the death penalty earlier this week.
The government ended
the six-year ban on capital punishment for terror-related cases following a
brutal terror attack on a school in Peshawar on Tuesday that killed 149 people,
mostly children.
"Yes, two
militants Aqil alias Doctor Usman and Arshad Mehmood have been hanged in
Faisalabad jail," Shuja Khanzada, Home Minister of central Punjab
province, where the executions took place, told AFP.
A senior official
from the prison department also confirmed the executions.
Aqil, who uses the
name Doctor Usman, was convicted for an attack on the army headquarters in
Rawalpindi in 2009 and was arrested after being injured.
Arshad Mehmood was
convicted for his involvement in a 2003 assassination attempt on former
president General Pervez Musharraf.
On Thursday,
Pakistan's military chief signed death warrants for six terrorists on death row
after the government ended the death penalty moratorium on Wednesday.
Just hours later,
the government warned prison officials of a possible jailbreak in the restive
northwest province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa amid fears that terrorist groups could
try to spring high-ranking comrades from jails to avoid the noose.
Pakistan's decision
to relinquish a ban on the death penalty in terror-related cases came as the
country's political and military leaders have vowed to wipe out the homegrown
Islamist insurgency following Tuesday's attack on the army school.
The United Nations
called for Pakistan to reconsider executing terror suspects, saying that
"the death penalty has no measurable deterrent effect on levels of
insurgent and terrorist violence" and "may even be
counter-productive".
"We urge the
Government not to succumb to wide-spread calls for revenge," said UN Human
Rights Office spokesperson Rupert Colville.
Pakistan imposed a
de facto moratorium on civilian executions in 2008, though hanging remains on
the statute book and judges continue to pass the death sentence.
Only one person has
been executed since then, a soldier convicted by a court martial and hanged in
November 2012.
Rights campaign
group Amnesty International estimates that Pakistan has more than 8,000
prisoners on death row, most of whom have exhausted the appeals process. The
government says that more than 500 convicts are related to terror cases.
Pasted
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