PAKISTAN: THREE MURDER CONVICTS, INCLUDING A JUVENILE OFFENDER, HANGED IN LAHORE AND FAISALABAD

June 10, 2015: three more murder convicts, including a juvenile offender, were sent to the gallows in Lahore and Faisalabad.
Aftab Bahadur Masih was hanged at the Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore, after being convicted of killing a woman and her two sons Amir and Atir in 1992 during a robbery attempt in Lahore. The Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), a law firm handling his case, and British rights group Reprieve said Aftab Masih, a Christian, was just 15 at the time of his arrest and had spent 23 years in prison before the hanging. The date of birth on his birth certificate and national identity card, 30 June 1977, was not disputed by Pakistani police or the courts. Masih’s lawyers said he was tortured into confessing to the crimes. Aftab insisted he was innocent and said that when he was arrested, the police had asked for a 50,000 Rupees (about 490 USD) bribe and said they would let him go if he paid. As a plumber’s apprentice, Aftab said he could not pay. In an essay written from jail and published a day before his hanging, he repeated his assertion that he was innocent.
Another death row prisoner, Muhammad Tariq alias Tara, was hanged at the Kot Lakhpat Jail for the murder of a man named Zahid in 1995.
Meanwhile, another murder convict, identified as Hashmat Ali, was hanged in Faisalabad’s Central Jail. He had killed six people in 2000 in Nankana Sahib.
Since the de facto ban on capital punishment ended on 17 December 2014, at least 159 people, including twenty-five convicted terrorists, have been executed across the country.   (Sources: Dunya News/Reuters/khybernews.tv, 10/06/2015)