KOHAT, April 22: Jail authorities are not allowing anybody, not even the mother and brother of the woman sentenced to death in a Hudood case, to meet her, saying she is a “dangerous prisoner”.
They say that under the jail laws all the prisoners who are condemned to death, are regarded as dangerous and confined to a small cell meant for them till the day when the death sentence is executed.
Meanwhile, it has become a big question that who will stone her to death as people are not aware of such responsibilities and the prison has no staffers to carry out the task.
The superintendent of the Kohat prison on Monday refused to allow this correspondent to meet the convict awaiting stoning and said that she had been lodged in a separate cell where nobody could meet her without permission from the home department.
“If you get the permission you will have to wait till Thursday when we will arrange a meeting,” the jail chief remarked.
He said the woman had been confined to “chakki” where she could meet her relatives only after recording her last wish.
Her seventh-month-old baby has also been lodged in the cell reserved for those condemned to death where conditions are too harsh for the little child in the hot weather.
Repeated requests made by a member of the Aurat Foundation, Musarat Shafi, a lawyer, for the custody of the child, have failed to move the authorities. Earlier, the judge had refused to grant the custody of the child to anybody terming the baby “case property” who would remain in the prison till the final judgment to be announced by the Shariat court in an appeal filed by the woman’s lawyer, Sardar Ali.
Sardar Ali told Dawn that although the judgment was given after his client, Zafran, had confessed to having committed the crime, there still was a lot of room to go into appeal.
The lawyer said the case was unique in the sense that such punishments had long been abandoned. At least, he added, in the history of Pakistan there were no such examples where a woman, who had been forcibly raped, was condemned to stoning to death and that too at a public place.





























