RAWALPINDI: A local Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) Saturday awarded
death sentence on two counts to Mumtaz Qadri, who killed former Punjab
Governor Salman Taseer on January 4 this year.
The court completed the proceedings at Adiala Jail, Rawalpindi.
Mumtaz
Qadri who was on guard duty in Taseer’s Elite Force guards at the time
of killing, shot the governor down for his views on the blasphemy law
outside a restaurant in Islamabad.
Qadri was arrested on the spot with the weapon. He confessed killing Taseer under oath.
During
the in-camera hearing of the Taseer murder case, the ATC said that the
murder, being a heinous crime, had no justification to it.
Assassin
Mumtaz, a constable in the Punjab Police Elite Force, tried to justify
the murder by stating that he had killed him for supporting Aasia Bibi,
a Christian woman who Taseer had projected as having been wrongly
convicted of committing blasphemy.
Legal experts say that the
accused has seven days to appeal against the verdict. "The court has
awarded my client with death. The court announced the death sentence
for him," Shuja-ur-Rehman, one of Qadri s lawyers, told the media.
Judge Pervez Ali Shah announced the verdict at an anti-terrorism court
behind closed doors in the high-security Adiyala prison in Rawalpindi,
the lawyer said.
Dozens of people rallied outside the prison
where the verdict was announced, chanting slogans in support of Qadri.
"The judge has also ordered him to pay a fine of 200,000 rupees," the
lawyer said. Shuja-ur-Rehman said soon he will lodge an appeal in a
high court against the verdict.
The killing of the reformist
Taseer was the most high-profile political assassination in Pakistan
since former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto died in a gun and suicide
attack in December 2007.
Taseer had supported a Christian
woman, mother of five, sentenced to death in November 2010 for alleged
blasphemy in the central province of Punjab. Sunni Tehrik and other
religious parties rejected the verdict calling it worse judgment than
the English court which awarded death sentence to Alamdin Ghazi decades
ago.
Hundreds of supporters who gathered outside of the court,
chanted slogans against the verdict and in favour of Qadri, protester
also demanded of the President to grant clemency to him.
Sunni
Tehrik, Tehrik-e-Islam Pakistan, Jam-e-Rizwiya Zia-ul-Aloom,
Shahab-e-Islami Pakistan, Anjuman Tulba-e-Islam and other religious
parties have announced to stage protest against the verdict that they
demanded to be revised. Online
