RAWALPINDI: Two murder convicts, including the killer of 11 people, whose executions were deferred twice last month, were finally sent to the gallows in Adiala jail on Tuesday, officials said.

The execution of retired Capt Zaffar Iqbal Bhatti was postponed on April 25 on the directives of the sessions court after his family approached the court stating that they had reached a patch-up with the heirs of the victims. Earlier, the convict’s hanging was also deferred on April 14.

Iqbal gunned down 11 members of his family in Arya Mohalla Rawalpindi and Sangori village of Mandra on January 10, 1994, over a family feud.

According to the police, in 1985, Iqbal’s mother, four sisters, a brother-in-law and an employee were killed by the rival group after he kidnapped a woman from their family.

Iqbal was arrested on August 30, 1994, and sent to the jail. On May 15, 2002, he was awarded the death sentence (five times) and fined Rs100,000 by the then anti-terrorism court-1 judge, Manzoor Ahmed Mirza.

In 2008, the review petition of the convicted murderer was rejected by a three-member bench of the Supreme Court and his mercy appeal was also turned down by the president of Pakistan on March 30, 2016.

After all efforts by the family of convicted prisoner proved unproductive, the death warrant of Zaffar was issued by the ATC and he was scheduled to be hanged on April 25.

On April 24, Zaffar’s family held a last meeting with him as he was scheduled to be hanged the next day but his execution was deferred.

After hanging on Tuesday, Iqbal’s body was handed over to his family who buried it in his native town of Sangori.

Another murder convict, Mirza Sarfaraz Ahmed from Gujar Khan, whose execution had also been deferred twice, was also hanged in the jail on Tuesday.

Sarfaraz had been arrested by the police in August 1993 for killing Tahir Mehmood.

Sarfaraz had borrowed Rs20,000 from Mehmood and when the latter demanded his money back, Sarfaraz took him away and murdered him on August 4, 1993.

On January 27, 1998, the trial court sentenced him to death. In 2003, the counsel for Sarfaraz filed a petition with the Lahore High Court (LHC), claiming that the convict was a juvenile at the time of the crime.

The LHC directed the sessions judge Rawalpindi to probe the matter and submit a report. In the light of the report, the LHC rejected the petition and later the counsel for the convict filed a petition with the Supreme Court, which was also dismissed.

On April 24, when the hanging of the convict was fixed, the counsel again filed an application with the sessions court, seeking the deferment of the execution on the ground that the convict was a juvenile when he killed the man. The court postponed the hanging till April 27 and checked the record and then dismissed the application.

The trial court (ATC-1) issued his death warrants on Saturday. the convict’s family visited the jail and held their last meeting with him on Monday, a prison department official said.

Since the government lifted the moratorium on executions in the wake of the terrorist attack on Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar on December 14, 2014, about 252 convicts, some of them involved in terrorism-related cases, have been hanged across the country.

Published in Dawn, May 11th, 2016