Multan: Pakistan has eight more convicted murderers on Tuesday, a day ahead of the one-year anniversary of an extremist attack that prompted authorities to lift a six-year moratorium on the death penalty.
Pakistan reinstated executions last year as part of a crackdown on extremism after Taliban attackers gunned down more than 150 people, most of them children, at an army-run school in the restive northwest on December 16, 2014.
The latest executions took place in various locations in Punjab province. “Two convicts on death row were hanged in Multan, two each in Bahawalpur and Gujrat and one each in Attock and Dera Ghazi Khan,” Chaudhry Arshad Saeed, an adviser to Punjab’s chief minister for prison affairs, told AFP.
Hangings were initially reinstated only for those convicted of terrorism, but in March they were extended to all capital offences.
No official figures on the number of executions carried out since the moratorium was lifted are available. Rights activists recently put the number at around 300.
Supporters argue that executions are the only effective way to deal with the scourge of militancy in the country.
But critics say the legal system is unjust, with rampant police torture and poor representation for victims during unfair trials, while the majority of those who are hanged are not convicted of terror charges.
School attack victims live gripped by fear
16-year-old Mubashir Subhan was in the school auditorium, surrounded by friends, when the Taliban gunmen came crashing in.
The first bullet grazed the back of his head, the second passed through his shoulder, and the third struck his left hand.
One year on, those who survived now study in the same rooms where they huddled in terror as their classmates fell around them.
The majority of them were children, many of whom were in the auditorium with Subhan when nine attackers armed with guns and explosives went on a cold-blooded killing spree.
Many are still gripped by a sense of paralysis when they enter the Army Public School in the northwestern city.
Andaleeb Aftab, a chemistry teacher at the school who fled into a bathroom with other staff after gunmen opened fire on them in a hallway, said the trauma has lingered. His 16-year-old son, was among those who died in the attack.
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