President Pervez Musharraf

BRITAIN. FOREIGN SECRETARY PLEADS WITH MUSHARRAF TO SPARE TOURIST CONDEMNED TO HANG

May 14, 2006: it was reported that new British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, will make a personal plea to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan to spare the life of Mirza Tahir Hussain, from Leeds, due to be hanged at dawn at the Adiala central jail in Rawalpindi on 1 June, his 36th birthday.
Having been charged with killing a taxi driver during a visit to Pakistan in 1988, he was originally convicted and sentenced to death in the civilian courts, but in successive appeals in 1992 and 1996, first his sentence and then his conviction were quashed after judges found flaws in the evidence. However, a few days after his second appeal, when he thought he was about to be released, pressure from the victim's family led to him being charged again for the same crime - this time in the sharia religious courts.
The three Islamic judges who tried him in 1998 split 2-1, with one, Abdul Waheed, issuing a 60-page dissenting opinion that described his reconviction as a 'miscarriage of justice'. Waheed said the allegations against Hussain had changed substantially between his civilian and religious trials, while there was no eyewitness or scientific evidence to support them.
There were major 'conflicts' between the accounts of witnesses, Waheed's opinion said, and many of the witnesses were related to the victim.
Basic principles of forensic science and pathology appeared to have been 'ignored'. Nevertheless, Hussain's renewed conviction and capital sentence stood, and in two reviews in 2003 and 2004 have been upheld by the sharia division of Pakistan's Supreme Court. In 2005, he lodged a petition for clemency with Musharraf, who turned it down. For several months, his execution was stayed while the victim's family tried, as is their right under sharia, to negotiate a 'blood price' with Hussain's relatives. Talks broke down in April. On the evening of 17 December 1988, Hussain had just returned to Pakistan for a short visit. Intending to travel to his family's ancestral home in the village of Bhubar, near Rawalpindi, he hired a taxi.
His version of what happened next, his brother, Amjad, told The Observer, is that the driver, Jamshed Khan, pulled a gun and tried to assault him: in the ensuing struggle, the gun went off and the driver was fatally wounded. Then, Amjad said, Hussain drove the taxi to a nearby petrol station where he spotted some policemen, told them what had happened and gave himself up. (Sources: The Observer, 14/05/2006)