Pakistan hanged four al-Qaeda-linked militants in the eastern Punjab province as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif pledged a decisive war against terror following last week’s massacre of children at an army-run school.
The men were convicted by military courts for various attacks, including the 2003 failed assassination attempt on former President Pervez Musharraf, a senior official familiar with the development said by phone. He asked not to be identified because of department rules.
“The government would not differentiate between the terrorists and those protecting them,” Nawaz Sharif said at a meeting to review counter-terror plans, according to a statement from his office. “Terrorism and sectarianism is like a cancer for Pakistan and now is high time we got rid of this menace.”
Nawaz Sharif and army chief Raheel Sharif vowed to eliminate all terrorists operating in Pakistan after a Dec. 16 Taliban attack killed 133 students in a Peshawar school and triggered calls for ruthless action. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan warned of retaliatory attacks in a statement today from spokesman Muhammad Khurasani.
“This is used as deterrence, to generate fear and show that you’re willing to act,” said Hassan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based political analyst who formerly taught at Columbia University in New York, referring to the executions. The use of military courts ensures a “quick decision while procedures on civilian sides are lengthy,” he said.
Raheel Sharif, who’s not related to the prime minister, signed death warrants for six convicts hours after the ban on capital punishment was lifted. Two were hanged in Punjab’s Faisalabad jail last week.
While 500 people are convicted in terrorism-related cases, the government is finalizing a list of those to be executed and the eventual figure might be “very low,” Federal Interior Ministry spokesman Adeel Sattar said by phone today.
A high court near Islamabad postponed the hanging of five militants convicted of killing a senior army officer after their relatives said they didn’t receive the military court’s judgment, defense lawyer Laiq Khan Swati said by phone. Swati said he didn’t know when his clients would be executed.
Nawaz Sharif has directed the Attorney General to expedite the process of vacating the courts’ stay orders on terrorism-related cases, Moinuddin Wani, a spokesman for the prime minister’s office, said in a text message.
While the army is fighting a war against insurgents in tribal regions along the Afghan border, another fight will begin in cities, Nawaz Sharif said today.
Security forces have killed 120 militants in two days, the Taliban’s Khurasani said. The dead include Abdul Mannan, brother of Umar Mansoor who’d overseen the school attack, according to the statement.
The Afghan-Pakistan checkpoint needs to be controlled to monitor who comes in and the federal government should send 500,000 illegal Afghan refugees back to Kabul, Pakistani opposition politician Imran Khan told reporters in Peshawar today.
To contact the reporter on this story: Kamran Haider in Islamabad at khaider2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Ten Kate at dtenkate@bloomberg.net Jeanette Rodrigues, Sam Nagarajan
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