Pak hangs man convicted in Musharraf assassination bid case

Pakistan today hanged a man convicted for attempting to assassinate former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, the seventh execution in the country after a moratorium on death penalty was lifted following the Peshawar school carnage.
Niaz Mohammad, a former Pakistan Air Force junior technician, convicted in the Musharraf assassination attempt case, was executed early this morning at the Central Jail here.
Niaz was sentenced to death for making an attempt on the life of the former Army Chief in Rawalpindi in 2003. He was a resident of the Swabi district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
He was kept at the Haripur Central Prison until yesterday, from where he was shifted to the Peshawar Central Prison in a helicopter, Dawn News reported.

The administration had deployed police and army personnel in and around the prison amid terror threats.
The superintendent of the prison had sent a letter to the Peshawar district judge on Monday requesting him to depute a magistrate for supervising the execution, a source was quoted by the daily as saying.

Of the seven people hanged so far in Pakistan, six were involved in the failed attempts to assassinate Musharraf, while one was involved in a 2009 attack on the army headquarters.
In the first attempt on the life of Musharraf, which took place in Rawalpindi on December 14, 2003, six Pakistan Air Force personnel (PAF) were convicted by a field general court martial at the PAF Base Chaklala on October 3, 2005, after they were kept in detention for over 20 months.

Besides Niaz, four personnel were also sentenced to death including former junior technician Adnan Rashid, who later escaped during the 2012 Bannu jailbreak, former chief technician Khalid Mehmood, former senior technician Karam Din, and former corporal Nawazish.
The sixth convict, Nasrullah, also a junior technician, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
A soldier of Pakistan Army, Abdul Islam Siddiqui, who was separately tried in the same case by a court martial, was executed on Aug 20, 2005 after conviction.
Similarly, seven people were on death row in the second attempt on the life of Musharraf in Rawalpindi on December 25, 2003. Five of them have already been executed after the moratorium on death penalty was lifted in the wake of the December 16 Taliban attack on a Peshawar school, which left 150 people, mostly children, dead.