PIA flight to bring home Kasi’s body

Published November 14, 2002

WASHINGTON, Nov 13: A PIA flight from New York to Pakistan later this week will also carry the body of Mir Aimal Kasi, if he is executed as scheduled, officials at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington said on Wednesday.

Kasi, who is to be executed for the 1993 killings of two CIA employees, has no regrets and believes that his death will be “for the cause of Islam,” one of his brothers said on Wednesday.

“Kasi is in high spirits and has no regrets as he is mentally prepared to become a martyr,” Kasi’s brother Naseebullah Kasi said in his hometown of Quetta. The condemned man told two of his other brothers, now in the United States, “that he is praying to God to accept his death for the cause of Islam,” Naseebullah said.

Embassy officials told Dawn they are working with Kasi’s brothers to help transport the body to Pakistan where it will be buried in his family’s ancestral graveyard at Quetta.

Kasi was shifted to the Greensville Correctional Center in Virginia on Monday where he is to be executed by lethal injection at 9pm EST Thursday.

Embassy officials confirmed that Virginia Governor, Mark Warner, has rejected the clemency appeal by Kasi’s family but the US Supreme Court had not yet disposed of a similar appeal. “Since the family has provided no fresh grounds for revision of the earlier rejection, it should prepare for the worst,” said an embassy official when asked if he expected the court to accept the appeal.

But an American journalist who spoke to Kasi on Monday night said: “He talked a lot about the appeals.”