By Aamir Latif
KARACHI, Pakistan
Pakistan has ended a moratorium on executions by hanging two Taliban commanders at a jail in the city of Faisalabad on Friday.
Mohammad Aqeel and Arshad Mehmood, who were both convicted of terrorism, were executed amid mounting pressure following a Taliban attack that killed 142 people, mostly children, in the city of Peshawar on Tuesday.
Pakistani Taliban earlier threatened to kill more children if the government went ahead with the hanging of Aqeel, a key commander who uses the alias Dr. Usman.
Aqeel was the lone survivor of a brazen attack on Pakistan Army’s General Headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi in 2009.
Aqeel was said to be the operational chief of the attack and was caught injured, while nine of his accomplices were killed in an hours-long gunbattle with troops. He was reportedly a former soldier with Pakistan Army’s medical corps.
A military court awarded the death penalty to Aqeel in 2009.
Mehmood was found guilty of being involved in an attack on former military ruler General Pervez Musharraf in 2003.
In the aftermath of the deadly Peshawar attack on an army-run school recently, Army Chief General Raheel Sharif signed the death warrants for six militants, including Aqeel Thursday. This will be the first hanging in Pakistan since 2008.
The country imposed a de facto ban on capital punishment following pressure from the European Union reportedly to get trade and export relaxations.
A spokesman of a Pakistani Taliban group, Muhammad Khurrasani, said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s family and children of Pakistan Army generals would have to bear the consequences if Aqeel or any other high-profile militant was hanged.
Khurrasani made the threat in a statement on behalf of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a conglomerate of different militant groups in Pakistan.
“We want to make it clear that if you hang any Taliban member, then we will take revenge by targeting your young children,” he said.
He tried to justify the killings of the children of army personnel by saying they did not “condemn the devilish acts of their fathers.”
The spokesman also rejected various decrees issued by several religious scholars in Pakistan who strongly condemned the recent Peshawar carnage.
Also Friday, the Pakistan army killed 91 militants in four separate clashes across the country, according to the army's media wing.
A gun-and-bomb terrorist attack on an army-run school in northwestern Pakistan’s Peshawar city killed over 140 people, mostly students, on Dec. 16.
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