Rights groups plead for life of 'another' condemned prisoner

Published June 9, 2015
Aftab Bahadur Masih is due to be hanged on Wednesday. -AFP/File
Aftab Bahadur Masih is due to be hanged on Wednesday. -AFP/File

ISLAMABAD: Rights groups and church leaders on Tuesday urged authorities to halt the imminent execution of a man for a murder committed in 1992, saying his conviction was flawed.

The plea for mercy for Aftab Bahadur Masih, who is due to be hanged on Wednesday, comes after another prisoner condemned to death in contentious circumstances was granted a last minute reprieve.

According to the Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), a human rights law firm handling his case, Masih was only 15 years old when he was arrested over a murder in Lahore.

The JPP said he was convicted on the basis of a confession extracted through torture from his co-accused Ghulam Mustafa, along with another eyewitness, and both have since retracted their statements.

British anti-death penalty campaign group Reprieve said it was a “scandal that Pakistan was planning to hang Masih."

“The execution of this innocent man, arrested as a child, should immediately be halted,” Reprieve's Maya Foa said in a statement.

Church leaders also appealed for a reprieve for Masih, who is a Christian.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Karachi, Joseph Coutts, has written to President Mamnoon Hussain asking for Masih's hanging to be delayed so his case can be investigated.

In a separate letter several other church leaders including Michael Nazir Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester in Britain, also called for clemency.

“Bahadur has now spent 23 years in prison — more than a life sentence — for a crime that the two witnesses on which his conviction rest now say he is innocent,to execute Bahadur in these circumstances would be to commit a grave injustice," said the letter.

Earlier on Tuesday Shafqat Hussain, sentenced to hang for killing a seven year old boy in Karachi in 2004, had an 11th-hour stay of execution.

Hussain's supporters say he was a juvenile when the crime was committed and was also tortured into confessing.

Pakistan has hanged more than 130 convicts since restarting executions in December after Taliban militants murdered more than 150 people at Army Public School (APS), most of them children.

A moratorium on the death penalty had been in force since 2008, and its end angered rights activists and alarmed some foreign countries.

Opinion

Editorial

Close the gap
Updated 16 Jun, 2025

Close the gap

Our imbalanced scorecard in the main shows that power development and prosperity reflect the shallowness of political claims.
Fiscal malfeasance
16 Jun, 2025

Fiscal malfeasance

IT is galling that, even in these times of economic distress, when hardship has pushed millions of ordinary...
Rochdale conviction
16 Jun, 2025

Rochdale conviction

THE recent conviction of seven men in the Rochdale grooming gang case is a hard-won moment of justice. The men, ...
Deepening conflict
Updated 15 Jun, 2025

Deepening conflict

Some media reports say that the US had shipped hundreds of missiles to Israel before the attack on Iran.
Some strides
15 Jun, 2025

Some strides

THE PTI government in KP is not known for sound public service delivery in a province whose economy has been ...
Air India tragedy
15 Jun, 2025

Air India tragedy

THE black box of the ill-fated Air India flight AI171 has been recovered, and that should reveal in the coming days...