Pakistani army Capt. Arshad Jameel (or Jamil) was hanged at Hyderabad Prison 20 years ago today.
Capt. Jameel exploited a security sweep to orchestrate the summary execution of nine Indian-armed terrorists … who turned out not to be terrorists at all, but ordinary residents of Tando Bahawal village whom Jameel had a personal grudge with.
It was a resonant case in a country dominated by its military and only wide public outrage at the journalistic expose unveiling the crime put Jameel in the dock of a military court.
Even so, the wheels turned so painfully slow that Pakistanis could not but suspect an institution accustomed to a broad grant of impunity of dragging its feet. Four years deep into Jameel’s appeals, two sisters of victims protested the delay by publicly immolating themselves on September 11, 1996. They died painfully of their burns, but they got the result they wanted: appeal denied.
On this day..
- 1790: Samuel Hadlock, Mount Desert Island murderer
- 1985: Joachim Knychala, the Vampire of Bytom
- 1949: Nicolae Dabija, anti-communist partisan
- 1784: Dirick Grout and Francis Coven, Boston burglars
- 1859: Thomas Ferguson, but not on a Sunday
- 1816: Francisco Jose de Caldas, wise person
- Sometime around 19 AD: Some wicked priests of Isis (... allegedly)
- Feast Day of St. Jude
- 1628: John Felton, assassin of the Duke of Buckingham
- 1941: Twenty Red Army officers
- 2008: Michitoshi Kuma, "It can't be undone now"
- 1839: Sebastien-Benoit Peytel, notwithstanding Balzac