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PAKISTAN: FOUR DEATH ROW CONVICTS ACQUITTED AND TWO DEATH WARRANTS SUSPENDED BY LAHORE HIGH COURT
January 5, 2015: Lahore High Court (LHC) benches in Lahore and Rawalpindi barred six death row prisoners from going to gallows on legal grounds.
Four death row convicts – Faisal Hameed, Tahir Hussain, Habib Ullah and Hafiz Naseer – were acquitted by Lahore High Court’s Rawalpindi bench. The four had been condemned to death by the Anti-Terrorism Court in 2004 for their involvement in 2002′s suicide bombing attack at Shah-e-Najaf Imam Bargah in Rawalpindi, which left 11 people dead and 30 injured.
The convicts then filed an intra-court appeal against the decision. The court, ordering immediate release of the accused, observed that they were awarded death sentence over ‘insufficient proofs’.
Meanwhile, the LHC’s Lahore bench suspended death warrants issued for two death row convicts, Muhammad Faiz and Muhammad Sharif, who were facing the noose in two separate murder cases. The court issued its order after hearing appeals of the convicts’ family members who stated in a petition that death warrants could not be issued for the prisoners since the Supreme Court is hearing their appeal. On 17 December 2014, Pakistan lifted the six-year moratorium on the death penalty in terrorism-related cases, a day after the Taliban-perpetrated massacre at a military-run school in Peshawar in which 150 people, including 134 children, were killed. Since then, seven convicted terrorists were hanged in Faisalabad and Peshawar. (Sources: dailytimes.com.pk, 05/01/2015)
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