Pakistan to hang two convicts on Tuesday

Islamabad: Pakistan authorities are set to hang two murder convicts on Tuesday, whose execution was deferred last month. The hanging of retired Zaffar Iqbal was postponed twice last month.

On April 25, his execution was delayed on the directives of the sessions court after a petition was filed with the court stating that his family had reached a settlement with the heirs of the victims, Dawn online reported.

Iqbal was sentenced to death for killing 11 members of his family in Rawalpindi on January 10, 1994. Zaffar Iqbal had killed six members of his relative Sarwar Shaheed's family in the Arya Mohallah and later gunned down five other members of the family in the Sangori village.

The second murder convict, Mirza Sarfaraz Ahmed, was arrested in August 1993 in a murder case and later sentenced to death. On April 24, his hanging was deferred to April 27 after his counsel filed a petition with the Lahore High Court (LHC), claiming that the convict was a juvenile at the time of the crime.

The two will be hanged in Rawalpindi's Adiala jail. Since the government lifted the moratorium on executions in the wake of the Army Public School attack in Peshawar on December 16, 2014, over 250 convicts, some of them involved in terrorism-related cases, have been hanged across the country.