Another person executed in Musharraf case
31 December, 2014
PESHAWAR: Niaz Mohammad, a former Pakistan Air Force junior technician, convicted in the Pervez Musharraf assassination attempt case, was executed early on Wednesday 31 December 2015.
He was hanged at the Peshawar Central Prison. Niaz was sentenced to death for making an attempt on the life of the former Chief of Army Staff General (retd) Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi in 2003.
Niaz Mohammad was a resident of Swabi district. He was kept at the Haripur Central Prison until Tuesday, from where he was shifted to the Peshawar Central Prison in a helicopter.
Earlier the administration had deployed the police and army personnel in and around the prison amid terrorist threats. The Sher Shah Suri Road, where the prison is situated, had already been closed to the traffic at night.
A source said the superintendent of the prison had sent a letter to the Peshawar district judge on Monday requesting him to depute a magistrate for supervising the execution.
He said in response to the letter, magistrate Johar Ijaz was given the duty to supervise the execution.
The last death sentence was carried out at the Peshawar Central Prison on June 6, 2006, when a condemned prisoner Mawas Khan of Sufaid Sung area in Peshawar was hanged to death.
In the first attempt on the life of General (retd) Pervez Musharraf, which took place near Jhanda Chichi bridge in Rawalpindi on Dec 14, 2003, six PAF personnel were convicted by a field general court martial at the PAF Base Chaklala on Oct 3, 2005, after they were kept in detention for over 20 months.
Besides Niaz Mohammad, four personnel were also sentenced to death including former junior technician Adnan Rashid, who later escaped during the 2012 Bannu jailbreak; former chief technician Khalid Mehmood; former senior technician Karam Din, and former corporal Nawazish.
However, the sixth convict, Nasrullah, also a junior technician, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Their joint appeal was dismissed in Feb 2006. Later on March 28, 2006, the Lahore High Court dismissed their petitions.
A Supreme Court bench headed by the former Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry rejected the appeals against the high court verdict on Sept 25, 2006.
The bench held that under Article 199 of the Constitution, civil courts had no jurisdiction to issue writ against orders passed by military courts.
The convicts' review petitions were also dismissed by the apex court in 2011. In petitions, Niaz Mohammad and other convicts had alleged they had falsely been implicated in the case.
They claimed they had voted against General Pervez Musharraf in the 2002 referendum and therefore, they were picked up after the December 2003 bid on his life, and were kept in illegal detention during which they were severely tortured.
A soldier of Pakistan Army, Abdul Islam Siddiqui, who was separately tried in the same case by a court martial, was executed on Aug 20, 2005 after conviction.
Similarly, seven people were on death row in the second attempt on the life of Musharraf in Rawalpindi on Dec 25, 2003. Five of them, including former Pakistan Army Naik Arshad Mehmood, Zubair Ahmad, Rasheed Qureshi, Ghulam Sarwar Bhatti and Russian citizen Akhlaque Ahmad, have already been executed after the moratorium on death penalty was lifted in the wake of the Dec 16 Taliban attack on a Peshawar school, which left 151 people — mostly children — dead.
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