Pakistan Set to Execute 500 Convicted Terrorists in Coming Weeks

Baku. 22 December. REPORT.AZ/ Five hundred convicted terrorists are set to be executed in Pakistan within the next few weeks, according to an announcement which was made by the country’s Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan.

“We will only execute militants whose appeals for mercy have been rejected by the president [Mamnoon Hussain],” Newsweek Pakistan quoted him as saying at a press conference in Islamabad.

The announcement comes in the wake of a recent order by Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to lift the death penalty moratorium in the country, following last week’s attack on a school in the northwestern city of Peshawar, which left 149 people dead including 133 children.

The interior minister, however, has claimed the decision to end the death penalty moratorium hadn't been motivated by that Taliban attack.

“The government took the decision before the Peshawar school attack in light of the Army chief’s suggestion to resume capital punishment as a deterrent to [potential] terrorists,” he said.

Report informs citing SputnikNews, since the lift of the moratorium, police, troops and paramilitary rangers have been deployed across the country, and airports and prisons have been put on red alert as the executions take place and troops have intensified operations against Taliban militants in northwestern tribal areas.

On Monday, Prime Minister Sharif ordered the office of the Attorney General of Pakistan and the country's top legal team to actively pursue all cases where some courts have granted stay orders against the executions of terrorists, according to the Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune.

The prime minister said that the government is committed to eliminating terrorism at any cost.

“There will be no mercy for those who have killed our children, citizens and soldiers,” the newspaper website quotes a spokesperson as saying.