Pakistan hanged 12 male convicts on Tuesday (March 17), an Interior Ministry spokesman said, making it the largest number of people executed on the same day since an unofficial moratorium on capital punishment was lifted in December.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lifted a de facto moratorium on capital punishment on December 17, a day after Pakistani Taliban gunmen attacked a school and killed 132 students and nine teachers.
The slaughter put pressure on the government to do more to tackle the Islamist insurgency.
Twenty-seven people have been hanged since then, most of them militants, but last week it emerged that officials had quietly widened the policy to include all prisoners on death row whose appeals had been rejected.
A statement from the interior ministry said the 12 men executed at various jails were not all militants. Some were murderers and others had committed ‘other heinous crimes’.
Shaken relatives waited outside the jails, after visiting the condemned men for the last time.
A weeping mother said her family had exhausted all avenues of a pardon. They had even sent a mercy petition to the president of Pakistan, but in vain.
“I also asked the president for mercy. I said, ‘Mr. President I beg you on behalf of my son, please pardon him. Please pardon my son'”, she wept.
Two execution orders were stayed in Multan and Dera Ghazi Khan.
One of the orders stayed was that of robbery and murder convict Waqar Nazir, who was pardoned by the victim’s family shortly before the execution was about to take place.
Waqar’s brother told reporters they would be forever grateful to the victim’s family.
“The widow and children (of murdered person) have saved my brother’s life. They have pardoned him, in the name of Allah. We are bowed down before Allah, and thanking Allah for saving our brother’s life. We are also greatly indebted to these people, and will remain grateful to them for the rest of our lives,” he said.
Another death sentence was halted at the central jail in Dera Ghazi Khan after the victim’s family pardoned the murder convict.
The moratorium on executions had been in place since a democratic government took power from a military ruler in 2008.
Human rights groups say many convictions in Pakistan are highly unreliable.
Its antiquated criminal justice system barely functions, torture has often been used to extract confessions and police are rarely trained in investigation, rights officials say.
There are more than 8,000 Pakistanis on death row.
On Thursday (March 19), the government is due to execute Shafqat Hussain. His lawyers say he was 14 when he was arrested a decade ago for the kidnap and manslaughter of a child, and his conviction was based on a confession extracted after nine days of torture.
Reuters
