Tag Archives: literally executed today

2015: Four more in Pakistan, but not Shafqat Hussain

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In what by this week’s measure constitutes a slackening pace, Pakistan hanged four more prisoners today, all for murder: Gulistan Zaman, Abdul Sattar, and brothers Mohammad Asghar and Ghulam Mohammad.

Meanwhile, the controversial scheduled Thursday hanging of Shafqat Hussain was postponed for further investigation by the Interior Minister at the very last moment.

“They dressed him up in white uniform for the execution,” Hussain’s brother* told the press. “Then they asked him to write his last will. He wrote: ‘I am innocent. They want to hang me for a crime I have not committed, to save others who have been freed.'”

Shafqat Hussain’s family reportedly produced a birth certificate supporting its contention that Hussain was 14 when arrested. Pakistan has contended that he was 23.


Shafqat Hussain

* Some news stories are naming that brother as “Gul Zaman” which is also the name reported for one of the killers hanged today. I’m not sure if this is media sloppiness, or if there are two distinct people involved in the day’s drama who happen to share a name.

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2015: Twelve in Pakistan

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Repudiating its former death penalty moratorium with bombast, the government of Pakistan hanged 12 men today.

From 2008 to 2014, Pakistan while continuing to hand down death sentences had suspended their completion; a soldier condemned by court-martial and hanged in 2012 was the sole execution during that period.

As these pages have recently noted, the December 16 Peshawar school massacre abruptly ended that moratorium.

Islamabad resumed executions almost immediately thereafter, explicitly as a response to that atrocity. Those were, at first, hangings of prisoners convicted of terrorism-related offenses — not connected to Peshawar per se but tit-for-tat in at least a thematic fashion.

Approximately 27 terrorists with pre-existing death sentences hanged over the ensuing weeks.

But in keeping with the tradition of our age, “just terrorists” was just the camel’s nose under the tent.

Earlier this very month, the Interior Ministry announced an end to the death penalty moratorium for all crimes — casting many more people under the pall of potentially imminent execution.

The execution of death sentences may be carried out strictly as per the law and only where all legal options and avenues have been exhausted and mercy petitions under Article 45 of the Constitution of Islamic Republic of Pakistan have been rejected by the president.

Pakistan has continued even during the moratorium to be one of the most active death-sentencing countries in the world, and has an estimated 8,000 “ordinary” condemned criminals. Because many — up to 1,000 — of those prisoners’ judicial processes and clemency appeals ran their course during the time of the moratorium, and because President Nawaz Sharif has shown an avidity in the three months since Peshawar for the hangman’s services, it has been feared that Pakistan’s execution toll this year could easily vault straight into the triple digits.

That prospective hecatomb is yet to be determined — but today’s start will not reassure human rights advocates.

Different media outlets are giving slightly different rosters of the executed this morning, and Zafar Iqbal confusingly appears to be a name shared by two different prisoners — so this list (via the Pakistan Tribune) is offered only tentatively pending more definitive revisions. It appears to me that all or nearly all committed murder, often in the course of some other crime such as robbery or rape.

  • Multan (1) — Zafar Iqbal (another man there named Wazar Nazir was reportedly reprieved at the last moment)
  • Karchi (2) — Muhammad Faisal and Muhammad Afzal
  • Faisalabad (1) — Muhammad Nawaz
  • Rawalpindi (2) — Malik Muhammad Nadeem Zaman and Muhammad Jawed
  • Gujranwala (1) — Muhammad Iqbal
  • Jhang (3) – Muhammad Riaz, Muhammad Sharif, and Mubashir Ali (or Abbas?)
  • Mianwali (2) — Rab Nawaz and Zafar Iqbal

The hanged Muhammad Afzal’s shrouded body is received by his brother in Karachi.

A second man in Multan, named Wazar Nazir, was reported reprieved at the last moment, as was an Asghar Ali in Dera Ghazi Khan.

According to Dawn.com, these executions bring the count of those executed since Peshawar to 39.

At least one more hanging is scheduled for this week: Shafqat Hussain, allegedly tortured into confessing to a murder at the age of just 14 or 15.

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2015: Sajida al-Rishawi and Ziyad Karboli, Jordan’s revenge on ISIS

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This morning at Swaqa prison south of Amman, Jordan executed two operatives of al-Qaida in Iraq in retaliation against ISIS for the murder of a captured Jordanian pilot.

ISIS yesterday posted a video showing a caged and gasoline-drenched Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh shrieking as flames devour him. The slickly produced 22-minute piece with the stomach-turning climax can be found online here, but don’t say we didn’t warn you. It’s nightmarish.

The unfortunate pilot had been used as a prop in ISIS’s provocative hostage diplomacy along with the Japanese captive Kenji Goto, who were both offered in exchange for Sajida al-Rishawi, a terrorist already on Jordan’s death row Jordan’s death row who had been widely forgotten. Video of Goto’s beheading came out several days ago.

Jordan last week agreed to trade al-Rishawi, if ISIS could prove that al-Kaseasbeh was still alive. Jordanian television has reported that the almost jeering video reply was actually filmed on January 3, indicating that the “hostage” negotiations had been a sham all along. (And/or deflecting some of the public anger away from the government; initial reports today had some crowds chanting against Jordan’s King Abdullah, who hastened home from meetings in Washington, D.C. after news of Lt. al-Kaseasbeh’s fate surfaced.)

Al-Rishawi, an Iraqi woman condemned to death in 2005 for taking part in a suicide bombing,* was promptly hanged in revenge by an enraged Jordan. Her crime predated ISIS, of course, but here’s guessing it was a public relations maneuver for the Islamist quasi-state to involve the al-Rishawi gratuitously and invite Jordan to martyr a female prisoner who turned terrorist after she lost a husband and three brothers killed fighting American troops.


Sajida al-Rishawi

Jordan has vowed an “earth-shaking response” extending far beyond hanging al-Rishawi and Ziyad Karboli, another al-Qaida in Iraq prisoner who was also executed.

“While the military forces mourn the martyr, they emphasize his blood will not be shed in vain. Our punishment and revenge will be as huge as the loss of the Jordanians,” a spokesman said in a prepared statement today.

“My son’s blood is worth more than those two,” Lt. al-Kaseasbeh’s father agreed — adding that Jordan’s true revenge must be “to destroy this terrorist group.”

* Her explosive vest failed to detonate, but the attack killed 57. Despite the notoriety of the bombing, al-Rishawi was understood as a small-timer by Jordanians who widely favored setting her free if that could actually secure the release of the lieutenant.

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2015: Ahmed Ali and Ghulam Shabbir, Pakistan terrorists

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Pakistan this morning has hanged at the central jail of Multan two members of the long-banned Sipah-e-Sahaba Sunni militant party.

Pakistan has been on an execution bender in recent weeks, following the terrorist massacre of 140-plus people at a Peshawar school on December 16.

Directly following that attack, Pakistan lifted a running moratorium on executions and began finalizing death sentences against various people with years-old terrorism death sentences having no particular connection to Peshawar; it carried out four cathartic hangings on December 20.

Ahmed Ali and Ghulam Shabbir both had death sentences from years-old murders (1998 and 2000) that Pakistan characterized as “terrorist” killings.

There have been a total of nine hangings since the Peshawar massacre, and at least eight more people have had mercy pleas officially rejected by Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain, and could be executed soon.

While this is a fine clip for three weeks’ work, it might just be the tip of the iceberg: Pakistan has threatened to execute up to 500 prisoners over the coming months.

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2014: Reyhaneh Jabbari

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At dawn today in Tehran’s Shahr-e Ray prison, Iran hanged Reyhaneh Jabbari despite a worldwide campaign to save her life.

Jabbari, 19 years old when her life went awry in September 2007, was a designer in the capital convicted of stabbing to death Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi — a former Ministry of Intelligence employee whom Jabbari said had attempted to rape her.

According to Jabbari, Sarbandi contracted her to redecorate his office. On the agreed day, Sarbandi and another man picked her up in their car and drove her to an unfamiliar location, stopping en route at a pharmacy to pick up some unknown articles later shown in court to be condoms and a sedative.

The room Sarbandi escorted her to looked filthy and uninhabited. When a suspicious Jabbari refused to close the door or doff her shawl for her “client”, Sarbandi grappled with her.

The young woman managed to get her hands on a knife,* she said, and stick it in his back, then fled the building back to the city. She was arrested late that night at her home. According to Jabbari, Sarbandi was still quite alive as she left, and the last thing she saw at the scene was his never-identified companion — who had stayed in the car initially — bursting into the room to fight with Sarbandi himself for some reason she could not comprehend.

Jabbari was condemned in 2009 and even as her sentence was re-confirmed in the ensuing years by court after court, it became an international cause celebre — executing a woman for stopping her would-be rapist. Hundreds of thousands of sympathizers tweeted, Facebooked and signed petitions; so small as such outcry can seem against an implacable state, they did at least give the impression of factoring into a last-minute reprieve Jabbari received ahead of her previous hanging-date four weeks ago. Iranian celebrities too joined in the reprieve campaign along with usual suspects like Amnesty International.

Unfortunately, Jabbari’s accusing her victim of sexual assault did not position her very well for obtaining a reprieve from Sarbandi’s family — which has the power under Iranian law to pardon offenders, right up to and even during the hanging. Sarbandi’s eldest son accused her of lying and of hiding the identity of the second man, the one whom Jabbari suggested might have been the true murderer.

“Only when her true intentions are exposed and she tells the truth about her accomplice and what really went down will we be prepared to grant mercy,” Jalal Sarbandi insisted.

Today, her lips are sealed.

I don’t want you to wear black clothing for me. Do your best to forget my difficult days. Give me to the wind to take away.

-From a last will Jabbari left as voice mail for her mother

* This was Jabbari’s own knife, one she had purchased two days before the incident.

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2014: Masanori Kawasaki

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Japan is in the news this morning for the surprise hanging of 68-year-old Masanori Kawasaki.

Kawasaki stabbed to death his sister-in-law Keiko Miura and her two granddaughters in 2007.

“It was an extremely cruel case,” Justice Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki said in announcing the execution.

Nevertheless, every execution no matter the circumstances of the crime draws controversy in Japan, which only hangs a handful of inmates in a typical year* and many of them only after very long waits. (At under seven years from stab to rope, Kawasaki’s was very fast by Japanese standards.)

Japan’s death penalty is distinguished — apart from the very fact of its existence, which makes it the only G8 country besides the United States to boast an active death chamber — by hangings conducted without prior announcement. Once a prisoner’s final appeals are turned down (Kawasaki’s were rejected in 2012) he can essentially be executed at any time the Justice Minister signs off, and have no more warning than the hour it takes to dash off final letters and final prayers. The condemned must acclimate day by day to the continual haunts of a capricious death that might snatch them at any moment.

Amnesty International can’t be far from the mark in the response issued by its East Asia Research Director to Kawasaki’s hanging: “Death row inmates live under the constant fear of execution, never knowing from one day or the next if they are going to be put to death. This is adds psychological torture to an already cruel and inhumane punishment.”

Another Japanese death row inmate, Shigeo Okazaki, also died this June 26 of 2014. He suffered respiratory failure.

* Kawasaki’s was the first hanging of 2014.

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2013: Xia Junfeng, chengguan slayer

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China has announced the execution this day of “homicide criminal” Xia Junfeng, a kebab vendor from Shenyang.

This case has been in the public eye for several years, and the predominant sentiment has been sympathetic towards the condemned man.

Xia and his wife Zhang Jing were part of China’s vast population of working urban poor, Xia having found his way into job insecurity by virtue of a layoff from the state electricity company. In the entrepreneurial spirit of the age, Xia started up an unlicensed business selling sausages and the like.

These denizens of the gray economy are, as a class, afflicted by the attentions of the City Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau, better known as the chengguan. Their benign job description entails administering municipal regulations, but this much-loathed force’s relationship to everyday citizens is perhaps best illustrated by the word chengguan‘s status as a shorthand neologism for bullying and abuse. Too many people know this goon squad firsthand, and too many stories of their worst excesses have circulated. Just this past July, the chengguan made headlines by killing a watermelon vendor.

“Chengguan abuses are an open scandal in China,” said Human Rights Watch’s China director. “The chengguan’s ability to flout China’s laws and inflict harm on members of the public is a recipe for greater public resentment and more violent confrontations.”

In the violent confrontation at issue in today’s execution, the chengguan chengguanned Xia Junfeng in May 2009. Xia fought back with his meat-carving knife, and slew two of his tormenters.

Death penalty cases redolent of the social stratification and institutional corruption that ordinary Chinese people experience have proven to be lightning rods in recent years.

Xia Junfeng’s turned, legally, on his claim that he killed protecting himself from the chengguan‘s beating.*

“Extralegal violence, thus employed to compensate for inadequate regulation and an absence of authority and legal deterrence, is no longer individual behavior. Such violence exists everywhere with the permission of the authorities. It is needed because of an overriding concern for “city image” and “urban management.” Finally, when extralegal violence is not monitored by the people and the media, and not punished by the law, it is only natural for Chengguan members to feel justified. Using violence with impunity enables the Chengguans to see violence psychologically as their “privilege,” a sign of status and pride. Since the legal and political status of Chengguan is unclear, it is only natural for its members to seek personal gain, vent their anger, and prey on the citizens they were intended to protect.”

-from the closing argument of Xia’s defense attorney

This allegation didn’t fly in court, where brother chengguan denied that they’d been abusing the shishkebaber, but it’s won in a rout when it comes to the court of public opinion. “His life and death are more than just a legal matter, but a bellwether of the era, with the tsunami-like public opinion firmly on the side of Xia Junfeng,” wrote author Yi Chen today.

Particularly galling for many is the disparity in treatment between Xia Junfeng and the likes of Gu Kailai, the latter a powerful business and political figure who was able to avoid execution despite being convicted of a scandalous contract murder. And Chengguan themselves never seem to be at risk of harsh punishment for any misbehavior; had Xia Junfeng been the one to leave that confrontation in a body bag, there certainly wouldn’t have been a death penalty case.


Anonymous cartoon circulated on Weibo criticizing Xia Junfeng’s condemnation. (Via) The drawing of the boy in the background was done by Xia’s son, whose art school fees were earned by his father’s roadside business.

Chinese speakers might want to peruse the Weibo feed of Xia’s widow.

* Several years ago, self-defense helped a Beijing migrat worker avoid execution for killing a chengguan who attempted to confiscate his bicycle cart.

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2013: Naw Kham, Mekong drug lord

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Today in Kunming, China, Burmese drug lord Naw Kham was executed by lethal injection along with three of his associates.

Naw Kham (or Nor Kham), a Burmese Shan, ran a sizable gang of drug traffickers/paramilitaries/pirates, the Hawngleuk Militia, in the Golden Triangle.

In addition to heroin smuggling, this gang also shook down for protection money the many Chinese commercial shippers coming down the Mekong River, and wantonly raided shippers that held out on them. He was untouchable in his lawless zone (with the possible protection of Burmese military to boot) for more than a decade.

Times may have started passing Naw Kham by in the 2000s.*

China’s economic boom has driven more shipping, and a search for investment outlets for Chinese capital, both inevitably increasing its presence on the economically developing Mekong. Ultimately this had to come at Naw Kham’s expense.

He had hit Chinese shippers before to the annoyance of Beijing, but matters came to a head when the kingpin allegedly retaliated against the flouting of his “taxes” by massacring 13 Chinese sailors in 2011 on board two tightfisted merchantmen. (“Allegedly” because Naw Kham blamed the Thai military for this slaughter, and some people believe him.)

At any rate, China put the screws to the drug lord, not only pressuring Southeast Asian governments for his capture but directly hunting him with special forces. Early in 2012, Naw Kham was arrested and his gang broken up after a multinational manhunt; the leader was extradited from Laos to face Chinese justice with five of his associates.** The accused had little recourse but to throw themselves on the mercy of the court.

Executed with Naw Kham — and underscoring the multinational complexion of his outfit — were Hsang Kham (a Thai), Zha Xika (a Lao), and Yi Lai (stateless). The other two defendants received a suspended (reprieved) death sentence, and an eight-year prison term.


Naw Kham being led to an execution van on March 1, 2013. Two hours of footage of the “Mekong River murderers” walking their green mile was broadcast on CCTV News, although not the executions themselves.

The case isn’t entirely closed with his date’s executions, however. China is still pressuring Thailand to bring to book Thai troops whom China says colluded (at the very least) in the Mekong murders. The future direction of that investigation is quite unclear.

* China, Burma, Thailand, and Laos, inked a 2001 pact to regularize shipping on the Mekong. It contained no provision allowing for stateless narco-buccaneers.

** It’s noteworthy that this is a non-Chinese citizen being extradited to China for a crime not on Chinese soil.

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2012: Richard Stokley, while his accomplice goes free

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On a summer’s day in 1991, Richard Stokley and Randy Brazeal picked up two 13-year-old girls from a fair in Cochise County, Arizona and drove them to the desert. There they raped them, then stomped, strangled and stabbed the two to death and dumped their naked bodies in a flooded mineshaft.

Today, Richard Stokley is set to bewas executed for that double homicide.

His accomplice Randy Brazeal is a free man living in Arkansas.

And little but the chance progress of justice and the human judgment calls that officers of the court make every day will distinguish the fate of two men, even though their trial judge has said that he “didn’t have a feeling that one was less culpable than the other.”

Brazeal, a 19-year-old troublemaker new to the area, and Stokley, a local brute twice his age, would spin different stories about exactly what happened in the desert that night to Mandy Meyers and Mary Snyder: about how the attacks began, and who particpated in what.

Long story short: Stokley’s version had both men as full participants, raping at least one girl apiece and each strangling a different victim. Brazeal’s version had him basically just giving people a ride and Stokley committing the crimes. (It’s not clear whether the victims were abducted from the fair, or went along willingly only to be attacked later.)

Forensic DNA testing was only just emerging in 1991, and it required months to process … months that the state did not have before Brazeal’s murder trial was set to begin. Even then, the state’s attorney worried that “the status of the law is in some question as to whether the DNA evidence would be admissible.”

This uncertainty set the parameters for a plea deal in which prosecutors took the guaranteed conviction and Brazeal dodged the needle. He was released in 2011 after serving concurrent 20-year sentences for second-degree murder.

But weeks after that deal was sealed (and before Stokley’s trial) DNA tests on semen retrieved from Mandy Meyers showed that both men had indeed raped her.

The DNA evidence helped seal Stokley’s conviction, even though it and other forensic evidence around the scene also tended to buttress Stokley’s “equal partners in the crime” story to the detriment of Brazeal’s version.

The net outcome* doesn’t necessarily look like justice. Mandy’s devastated mother, Patty Hancock, has been vocal in the run-up to Stokley’s execution about her disgust with the sentencing disproportion.

“With the evidence that they did have, Randy Brazeal should be sitting right next to Richard Dale Stokley,” she told one reporter. “And I will say that until the day I die.”

Stokley, for his part, filed a similar appeal in the courts as grounds for reducing his own sentence. But even though he’s availed every legal avenue possible, he didn’t bother trying the long odds at a gubernatorial reprieve — instead writing the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency:

I am also sorry I was mixed up in those awful events that brought me to this. I have been sorry for the victims and the victims’ families. But no one wants to hear of my miserable sorrow, they just want for me to get dead, which is vengeance. They think it will bring ‘closure.’ But there is no healing in that. Ever.

I have decided to decline a clemency hearing. I don’t want to put anyone through that, especially since I’m convinced that, as things stand now, it’s pointless. I reckon I know how to die, and if it’s my time, I’ll go without fanfare. And if it ain’t, I won’t. God’s will be done.

God’s will is scheduled for 10 a.m. Mountain time today. (Update: Stokley was executed as scheduled.)

* It’s particularly striking that the man who was more forthcoming and cooperative with investigators ended up with the heavier sentence.

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2012: Ajmal Kasab, 26/11 Mumbai terrorist

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At 7:30 this morning at Yerwada jail in Pune, Maharashtra, the sole surviving author of 21st century India’s most notorious terrorist plot was put to death.

Ajmal Kasab was captured alive after the deadly November 26, 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. The “26/11” date will live quite a while in infamy on the subcontinent … as will the chilling CCTV images of the armed and armored Kasab prowling the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Kasab and his partner in the rail station attack slew more than 50 people that evening, and another dozen-plus policemen in running gun battles as they fled the scene.

This was only one of a multitude of Mumbai targets hit in an audacious attack on that 26/11 by a ten-man team of Lashkar-e-Taiba* Islamic militants, trained in Pakistan. They had sailed in from Karachi (murdering the crew of a small fishing boat they hijacked) just for the occasion.

Kasab’s confederates elsewhere in town achieved a similar body count hitting a pair of five-star hotels, the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi Trident, each of which turned into a multi-day hostage standoff only resolved by a bloody to-the-death shootout with paramilitaries.

Attacks on a cafe and a Jewish center, as well as several timed bombs, also took place. In all, some 166 people — plus nine of the ten terrorists responsible — died, with hundreds more wounded and a nation of more than a billion shaken and angry. It’s one of those cases that make people say, “if ever there was a death penalty case …” Kasab’s speedy dispatch has been a hot political topic since he was first handed a death sentence on May 6, 2010, and the whole affair has not done any favors for the ever-touchy India-Pakistan relationship.

The (usually) sluggish India death penalty process requires that cases cleared by the judiciary receive executive clemency consideration — a stage of the process that often takes years. Recent presidents have tended to stand on only considering such applications in the order they are submitted, and then either granting those clemencies after ponderous review, or scarcely prioritizing any review at all, with further judicial interventions and a shrinking pool of trained hangmen also gumming up the works.

It’s been a recipe for virtual death penalty abolition: the last hanging prior to Kasab’s was in 2004, India’s only other execution this century. This is in a country with one-sixth of the world’s population.

Pranab Mukherjee, India’s new president, took office with a number of presidential clemency applications still pending, some dating back to the late Nineties. While there’s no guarantee that he’ll break with the glacial pattern established by his predecessors when it comes to backlogged everyday criminals, Mukherjee advanced this exceptional petition right to the front of the line and turned it down flat even as Kasab was secretly transferred from his unusual egg-shaped bombproof Mumbai cell to the hanging facility at Yerwada.

“His execution,” said Maharashta Home Minister R.R. Patil, “is a tribute to the victims.”

* Lashkar-e-Taiba also masterminded a 2001 massacre at the Indian Parliament, which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.

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