Hands Off Cain
Pakistan

Pakistan hanged two Afghan men for killing the leader...

Pakistan hanged two Afghan men for killing the leader of an Afghan women's rights group and two of her aides 15 years ago, jail officials said

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Pakistan hanged two Afghan men for killing the leader of an Afghan women's rights group and two of her aides 15 years ago, jail officials said.
They said Ahmed Sultan and Mohammad Humayun, convicted for the February 1987 murders of Mina Kishwar Kamal, founder of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), and two aides, were hanged at dawn at Machh jail in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. Their bodies were handed to the Afghan consul-general in the provincial capital Quetta, the officials said.
RAWA blames the murders, which occurred in Quetta, on the Khad secret police of the government in then Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. The hanging came after years of legal wrangling, in which the original sentence of life imprisonment passed by a lower court in Quetta was upheld on appeal but later converted into the death sentence by the country's Supreme Court.
A RAWA spokeswoman complained recently that Pakistani authorities were delaying the executions, and also said some members of Afghanistan's present interim government were trying to get Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to issue a pardon.
But jail officials said Musharraf had rejected a mercy appeal from the convicts.
Mina's relatives and RAWA also rejected appeals from the convicts' relatives for a pardon under Islamic and Afghan traditions, officials said.
RAWA, established in 1977, has used Quetta as its base since 1981 to campaign against the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and later against hardline Islamic groups that discriminated against women.
SOURCES
  • (Sources: Reuters, 07/05/2002)