LAHORE (Web Desk) – A condemned prisoner Aftab Bahadur Masih was executed in Kot Lakhpat Jail on Wednesday morning despite requests from rights groups and Christian leaders to halt the execution, terming his conviction as flawed.
Masih’s lawyers had contended that he was tortured into confessing to murder, in a case that has prompted concern among rights groups and the United Nations.
“Aftab Bahadur Masih, a Christian man, was hanged in Kot Lakhpat prison of Lahore Wednesday morning,” an official at the jail told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Aftab Bahadur was sentenced to death for killing three people in 1992 and human rights group Reprieve said two witnesses who said Bahadur was implicated under torture.
At the time, the death penalty could be passed on a 15 year old, but the minimum age was raised to 18 in 2000.
The date of birth on Bahadur’s birth certificate and national identity card, June 30, 1977, is not disputed by Pakistani police or the courts.
Masih, a Christian, had spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of murder in the eastern city of Lahore in 1992.
The Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), a law firm handling his case, and British rights group Reprieve said he was just 15 at the time of his arrest and so too young to face the death penalty.
“This is a truly shameful day for Pakistan’s justice system,” Maya Foa, director of Reprieve’s death penalty team, said in a statement. “To the last, Pakistan refused even to grant his lawyers the few days needed to present evidence which would have proved his innocence. This is a travesty of justice and tragedy for all those who knew Aftab.”
Dozens of activists and relatives of Masih held a protest on Tuesday outside the Lahore press club demanding the execution be stopped, while church leaders had also appealed to the president for a reprieve.
The Roman Catholic Bishop of Karachi, Joseph Coutts, wrote asking for a delay, while other senior church officials, including the former Bishop of Rochester in Britain, sent a separate letter appealing for clemency.
“Mr 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,” the letter says. “To execute Mr Bahadur in these circumstances would be to commit a grave injustice.”
More than 130 convicts have been hanged in Pakistan since restarting executions in December after Taliban militants murdered more than 150 people at Peshawar’s Army Public School, most of them children.
A moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in December, angering rights activists who claim many of the thousands now facing death have not received a fair trial.
In an essay written from jail and published a day before his hanging, Bahadur, a Christian, repeated his assertion that he was innocent.
“But I do not know whether that will make any difference,” he wrote. “I have not given up hope, though the night is very dark … It would perhaps have been better not to have to think of what the police did to try to get me to confess falsely to this crime.”
His execution comes just days after another man, Shafqat Hussain, condemned to death for a murder allegedly committed when he was a juvenile was granted a last-minute reprieve.
On Wednesday, another murder convict Tariq alias Tara was also executed at Kot Lakhpat Jail for the murder of a man named Zahid, a duty officer at the jail confirmed.
