Pakistan imposes one-month moratorium on executions

Islamabad

 Pakistan has imposed a one-month moratorium on executions during Ramadan, officials said yesterday, giving a temporary reprieve to a death row prisoner whose lawyers say he was a juvenile at the time of the crime.

 Shafqat Hussain was sentenced to hang for killing a seven-year-old boy in 2004, when his lawyers and family say he was under 18 and therefore not eligible for execution.

 "It is a tradition that nobody is executed in the (Islamic) fasting month of Ramadan and the authorities have ordered that this tradition continues this year too," said Nusrat Mangan, Inspector General of Prisons in the southern province of Sindh where Hussain has been held.

 "We have to seek death warrants two weeks prior to hang any convict, so his hanging will take place after at least one month," said Mangan.

 An official in the federal interior ministry confirmed that a notification had been issued to halt executions during Ramadan, which starts this week in Pakistan.

 But Nazeer Farooq, Inspector General of Prisons in the country's most populous province of Punjab, said his department had not received such a notification yet.

 "We have to execute around two dozen convicts before Ramadan in any case," he told AFP.