Since lifting a moratorium on executions in December, Pakistan has put more than 200 people to death, according to Amnesty International, a human rights group.
Hussain, a night watchman, was convicted in 2004 of killing a 7-year-old boy in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, after abducting him and demanding ransom. The conviction was based on Hussain’s confession to police, but Justice Project Pakistan, a law firm specializing in human rights cases that took up Hussain’s case, said he had confessed only because he was tortured.
Advocates for Hussain have also said that he was under 18 when he was sentenced to die, which would have made him legally ineligible for the death penalty. The Pakistani Interior Ministry said that it had investigated that claim and found that he was 23 at the time.
Hussain was hanged in a prison in Karachi. He was allowed to see family members before the execution, prison officials said.
Hussain’s execution was delayed four times, most recently in June, amid the controversy surrounding his case. The Pakistani Supreme Court ruled in June that it could not overturn his conviction and that it could not interfere in the matter of Hussain’s age, because that issue had not been raised by his lawyers at trial.
Still, advocates for Hussain, including Pakistani politicians, had continued to press his case. The governments of Sindh province, which includes Karachi, and the Pakistani-controlled part of the disputed Kashmir region, where Hussain was born, both urged the central government to review the case in recent days.
“The trial of Shafqat Hussain sums up the structural flaws in our criminal justice system, where police torture and confessions under duress are the norm,” said Raza Rumi, a Pakistani analyst based in Washington who is a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. “Here is a case where a poor family was unable to pursue a criminal case that requires resources and access to influential people within the state.”
Pakistan’s decision to end a six-year moratorium on the death penalty in December came after the country was roiled by an attack on a school that left about 150 people dead, most of them children. Officials initially said that only convicted terrorists would be executed, but within weeks, the authorities began putting other prisoners to death.
“Shafqat’s execution speaks to all that is wrong with Pakistan’s race to the gallows,” Maya Foa, the director of the death penalty team at the international rights group Reprieve, said in a statement.
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