Pakistani hanged for raping seven-year-old girl
A man sentenced to death for raping and killing a seven-year-old girl was executed in eastern Pakistan after the president turned down his plea for clemency.
Niaz Ahmed, 33, was hanged yesterday at a prison in Multan, a city in the eastern province of Punjab, said prison superintendent Malik Ziaullah Khan.
Ahmed was arrested in 1998 on charges of abducting, raping and killing the girl, identified only as Sumaira, in Multan. A year later, a court sentenced Ahmed to death, and two higher courts, including the Supreme Court, later rejected his appeals.
In May, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf also rejected his plea for clemency. Under Pakistan’s laws, the head of state can grant a pardon to a death row convict.
Meanwhile, police arrested a man who confessed to killing his sister and her alleged lover in a village near Multan. The man claimed the couple’s intimate relations had sullied his family’s honour.
Police are still hunting two alleged accomplices in the killings.
The arrested man, Ahmed Khan, and two of his brothers, who are still at large, allegedly stabbed Qureshan Bibi, 21, and Anwarul Haq, believed to be in his 20s, on Monday as they sat together in a field near their home, said police officer Mohammed Iqbal said.
“We are respectable people and our sister was throwing away our respect,” Iqbal quoted Khan as saying during his interrogation.
Hundreds of people, mostly women, die each year in “honour killings” in Pakistan – killed on suspicion of having affairs outside of marriage or marrying without their family’s consent.
