PESHAWAR, June 1: A juvenile offender, who is on the death row after being convicted in a multiple murder case, is likely to be executed in the central prison here after the 15-day stay granted by the home department expires on June 6.

“When the stay period lapses, the prison authorities will fix a date for his execution,” a prison official told this correspondent.

All appeals and mercy petitions, including one to the president of Pakistan, filed by the convict, Mutaber Khan, have been rejected.

The convict was arrested in 1996 for killing five persons of the same family and was sentenced to death by a trial court in Swabi. He had confessed that he and his companions had killed the family members after the head of the family reneged on his promise to let him marry his daughter.

The convict belonged to the Tordher area in the Swabi district and was arrested on Apr 15, 1996 after a woman injured in the incident, Ms Shehzadgai, had named him and an absconder, Gul Taza, for the attack on her family.

Khanzada, his three daughters and a son had been killed in the incident.

The trial court convicted him on Oct 6, 1998, and awarded him capital punishment on five counts.

In May 2000, his appeal was dismissed by the Peshawar High Court. On Sep 13, 2001, the Supreme Court had dismissed his appeal.

The convict contends that he was 16 at the time of his arrest by virtue of his purported school leaving certificate issued in 1990, according to which his date of birth was Feb 8, 1980. Besides, he argued, he was kept in the child section of the central prison for about two years.

The issue of his age was not taken up before the trial court while pleas filed about his age were successively rejected by appellate forums, including the Peshawar High Court and the Supreme Court.

The latest of appeals filed by his mother, Taj Bibi, was dismissed by the two-member bench of the Supreme Court in Peshawar on June 15, 2005.

A notification issued by the president of Pakistan in December 2001 commuted death sentences of all juvenile offenders to life imprisonments but the convict was not benefited as his age had not been recorded during the trial.

He had moved the high court, seeking benefit of the said

notification, but the court dismissed his plea on the ground that the Supreme Court had already upheld his death sentence.

His mother had requested the Peshawar High Court’s chief justice through an application filed in early 2002 to commute her son’s sentence to life imprisonment in view of his not being an adult at the time of murders, had been dismissed in Feb 2003 on the same grounds.