A wheelchair-bound prisoner is to be hanged today, despite previous executions being called off after alarm raised by human rights activists
Islamabad: Jail authorities in Pakistan were on Tuesday set to hang a 43-year-old paraplegic, who developed tubercular meningitis while on death row after being convicted of murder, which according to rights group will be the 300th execution since the controversial moratorium was lifted in the country.
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Abdul Basit, who is paralysed from the waist down, was convicted in May 2009 of murder and is scheduled to be hanged today. Amnesty International, in its report, said it has recorded 299 executions since the death penalty was reinstated, following a deadly attack in an army-run public school in Peshawar on December 2014.
“Even if the authorities stay the execution of Abdul Basit, a man with paraplegia, Pakistan is still executing people at a rate of almost one a day. There was no evidence the relentless executions have done anything to check extremism in the country,” David Griffiths, the group’s South Asia research director, said.
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