Punjab prison authority executes four Pakistani convicts
Pakistan has hanged four men sentenced to death for involvement in murder, bringing the number of people executed to 254 since December, when a moratorium on death penalty was officially lifted.
“All the executed people were involved in murder cases which were over a decade old,” Chaudhry Arshad Saeed, an adviser to the chief minister for prison affairs in Punjab Province, said on Tuesday.
The four convicts were hanged early in the morning in the districts of Kasur and Gujrat.
The Pakistani government lifted a six-year moratorium on the death penalty in December 2014.
The move was part of Islamabad’s measures to crack down on Pakistani Taliban militants who killed more than 150 people, mostly children, in an attack in the same month on a school in the restive northwestern city of Peshawar.
In March, Pakistan extended the death penalty of hanging to all capital offenses. Hangings were in the beginning reinstated only for convicts in terrorism cases.
Nearly 230 out of the total 254 executions have been carried out since the moratorium was fully removed on March 10.
Islamabad has been urged by the United Nations, the European Union and human rights groups to reconsider reinstating a ban on capital punishment.
Human rights activists claim that many of those hanged since March have not been convicted of terror charges.
Last year, Amnesty International estimated that Pakistan had more than 8,000 prisoners on death row, most of whom had lost in their appeals.
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