A convicted murderer has been executed in the Central Jail Faisalabad on Thursday morning.
Muhammad Afzal, a resident of Sialkot, had been remained on death row for around 2 decades.
He was found guilty of shooting a man, Muhammad Saleem, dead in 1995 over an old rivalry. and awarded the death sentence by district and session courts on May 25, 1995.
The review petitions of the accused were turned down by the higher and superior courts. President of Pakistan had also rejected his mercy appeal.
The last meeting of the condemned prisoner with his family had been arranged on Wednesday.
Some 8,000 condemned prisoners are still in a death row in various jails across the country.
Earlier the ruling PML-N government had lifted the moratorium on the death penalty on Dec 17, 2014, in terrorism related cases only, in the wake of a Taliban attack at the Army Public School in Peshawar, which claimed 141 lives, most of them children.
Later, the government completely reinstated capital punishment for all offences that entail the death penalty.
The United Nations, the European Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have urged the government to re-impose the moratorium on the death penalty.
Source: Dawn, March 27, 2015
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