Pakistan finally executes child killer

Pakistan on Tuesday executed convicted child killer Shafqat Hussain at the Karachi Central Prison after his hanging was postponed on four previous occasions this year, media reports said.

He was sentenced to death in 2004 for the kidnapping and involuntary murder of a seven-year-old Karachi boy.

All courts in the land had turned down his appeals and the Supreme Court threw out a review petition that was the first to raise the matter of Shafqat's juvenility at the time of arrest, maintaining that this line of defence should have been introduced at the trial court level.

Almost six months ago, before Shafqat was scheduled to be executed on January 14, he was granted a last-minute reprieve and Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had ordered an inquiry to establish the veracity of the lawyers' contention that Shafqat was a minor at the time of sentencing.

Pakistan lifted the ban on executions in December 2014, which had been in place since 2008, following a Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar that killed more than 150 people - mostly children - in the country's deadliest ever terror attack.