Tag Archives: pervez musharraf

2005: Abdul Islam Siddiqui

Posted on by

On this date in 2005, Pakistani soldier Abdul Islam Siddiqui was hanged for an assassination attempt against President Pervez Musharraf.

In the December 2003 near-miss, jammed remote control triggers detonated C4 explosives that brought down the Jhanda Chichi Bridge in Rawalpindi … but it was moments after Musharraf’s convoy had already crossed it. “There was an explosion just half-a-minute after we crossed (the bridge),” Musharraf told a television interviewer. “I felt the explosion in my car.”

That gentleman spent the 2000s riding the tiger of Pakistan’s treacherous internal politics after deposing the elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup. He survived several assassination attempts, often originating — as this one did — from Islamist factions of the powerful Pakistani military aggrieved by Musharraf’s efforts to curb their influence, and with his post-9/11 collaboration with the U.S. War on Terror.

But in a rush to strike back against such actors, did Pakistan get the wrong guy? Siddiqui claimed innocence up until his hanging, and years afterward some of his alleged co-conspirators claimed that they’d been tortured for weeks on end to extract their denunciations.

Several other death sentences were imposed in this affair, although none were executed for many years after, when a 2014 terrorism incident caused Pakistan to discard an execution moratorium and initiate a hanging binge.

Musharraf himself, who stepped down in 2008 and now lives in exile in Dubai, was controversially condemned to death in absentia in December 2019. It’s vanishingly unlikely the sentence will ever be executed.

On this day..