Pakistan executes killer Shafqat Hussain in controversial case
Pakistani authorities have executed a man convicted of kidnapping and later killing a seven-year-old boy more than a decade ago, when it was until recently not known whether he was himself a minor or not.
Iqbal Hassan, a Pakistani prison official, said Shafqat Hussain was hanged shortly before dawn on Tuesday at the Karachi Central Prison. His sentence had been postponed on a number of occasions this year.
Hussain was arrested and sentenced to death in 2004 for the abduction and murder of a boy, who lived in a Karachi apartment building where Hussain used to work as a security guard.
Confusion over Hussain’s date of birth raised questions of whether he was a juvenile or of lawful age, when he was handed down the death sentence.
A time to die
Almost six months ago, Hussain was granted a last-minute reprieve and Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan ordered an inquiry to determine his exact age at the time of sentencing. An execution scheduled for January 14 was postponed to another time as a result.
Hussain was then set to be sent to gallows on March 19. However, dozens of civil society representatives and activists staged a protest rally outside the Presidential Palace in the capital, Islamabad, a day before the execution.
The hanging was subsequently rescheduled for 72 hours and then 30 days later.
An executive inquiry by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) concluded in late April that Hussian was 23 years old when he was condemned to death, issuing another death sentence for the Pakistani man.
But a day before his execution on May 6, the Islamabad High Court delayed the hanging.
An anti-terrorism court in Karachi issued a fresh death warrant for Hussain on June 1, ordering his execution eight days later.
The convict’s execution was once again delayed late on June 8. On July 27, after the expiry of the moratorium on the death penalty in the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Hussain received a fresh death sentence and was hanged in the early hours of August 4.
Pakistan lifted the ban on executions, which had been in place since 2008, last December after pro-Taliban militants mounted an attack on a school in the city of Peshawar, killing more than 150 people, mostly children.
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