KARACHI: Death-row prisoner Shafqat Hussain was given a last-minute reprieve after his execution was stayed a fourth time late on Monday night, sources at the Karachi Central Prison told Dawn.

Shafqat was arrested and sentenced to death in 2004 for the kidnapping and murder of a seven-year-old boy. The child lived in a Karachi apartment building where Shafqat worked as a security guard, Dawn.com reported.

His execution orders have been criticised by human rights organisations and civil society activists after doubts over his age at the time of sentencing surfaced.

Amnesty International and United Nations have also been pressing Pakistan to halt the execution.

On Friday, a group of UN human rights experts, in a last-ditch effort, urged the Pakistani authorities to halt the execution — scheduled for June 9 — who was convicted for a crime reportedly committed as a child.

All courts in the country turned down Shafqat’s appeals and the Supreme Court threw out a review petition that was the first to raise the matter of his age at the time of his arrest, maintaining that this line of defence should have been introduced at the trial court level.

Shafqat’s legal team had insisted that his earlier defence attorneys did not plead his case competently.

Two months ago, when Shafqat was scheduled to be executed, he was gran­ted a reprieve and Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan ordered an inquiry to establish the veracity of the lawyers’ contention that Shafqat was a minor at the time of sentencing.

The case garnered a lot of attention on social and mainstream media and became a bone of contention between supporters and opponents of the death penalty.

Published in Dawn, June 9th, 2015

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