BRITAIN has made a dramatic appeal for the life of a British Muslim who faces execution by hanging under Islamic law in Pakistan despite being acquitted of murder by the country’s criminal courts.
Mirza Tahir Hussain, from Leeds, who served in the Territorial Army, has spent the past 18 years on death row for a crime that he claims he did not commit. The date of his execution is to be announced on June 1, two days before his 36th birthday.
He has endured seven trials and appeals throughout which he has consistently denied robbing and murdering a taxi driver in 1988.
Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, intervened in the case yesterday, writing a personal letter to President Musharraf of Pakistan to plead for the death sentence to be commuted.
The “exceptional” appeal was made on humanitarian grounds considering the severity of the sentence and the time that Hussain has already spent in prison, a spokesman for Mrs Beckett said. It also refers to Britain’s longstanding opposition to the death penalty and mentions Tony Blair’s interest in the case.
Hussain was initially sentenced to death in 1989, then cleared on appeal by the High Court in Lahore but subsequently convicted of highway robbery by a religious court, which again imposed the death penalty.
Hussain’s brother, Amjad, who visited him in jail yesterday, told The Times that he was “completely distraught and looks much older than his age”. He added: “We were only allowed to speak to him through the iron bars of the cell. The situation in the jail is terrible and inhuman and most of the prisoners are in shackles.”
It was the first time in six years he had been able to visit his brother because of threats from the family of Janshir Khan, the dead taxi driver. They have vowed to avenge him and have refused an offer of £18,000 from the Hussain family to revoke the death penalty.
Hussain was 18 when he went to Pakistan in December 1988 to visit relatives. He spent one night with an aunt in Karachi before travelling to Rawalpindi, intending to go on from there to his ancestral village of Bhubar.
In Rawalpindi he found a taxi driver who agreed to take him to the village for 500 rupees (£4.40). Hussain alleged that during the journey the driver abruptly stopped the car and attempted to assault him sexually at gunpoint.
According to Hussain’s statement, the weapon went off as they struggled and the driver was wounded. Hussain immediately drove the taxi to a police station and reported the incident. He was charged with murder and in September 1989 was found guilty and sentenced to death at the Sessions Court in Islamabad.
The court gave no weight to a character reference from Hussain’s TA battalion in Leeds, which described him as “an honest man, very polite and always well turned out . . . Private Hussain is a likeable man and a respected member of this company.”
Three years later, however, an appeal court found serious discrepancies in the case, struck out the death sentence and returned it to a lower court. A retrial in 1994 led to a sentence of life imprisonment.
In 1996 the Lahore High Court heard a further appeal by Hussain and quashed his convictions. But within a week, following the intervention of the taxi driver’s family, his case was passed to the Federal Sharia Court, which held jurisdiction over allegations of highway robbery.
In 1998 that court found Hussain guilty of robbery by a 2-1 vote of its judges. The third judge wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion and described the verdict of his colleagues as a miscarriage of justice. Campaigners say that the court broke its own rules because Sharia requires there to be a witness to the crime or a confession by the accused.
In 2003 and 2004 the Pakistani Supreme Court reviewed the findings of the Sharia court and upheld the death penalty. Last year Mr Musharraf rejected a plea for clemency from Hussain’s family.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry confirmed yesterday that a request for clemency had been received from the British Government but offered little hope. “The judicial legal system is taking its course. The sentence has been upheld by the highest court in Pakistan,” a spokeswoman said.
Until now successive foreign secretaries, from John Major to Jack Straw, have declined to act in the case because Hussain has dual British and Pakistani nationality. In 1999 Baroness Scotland of Asthal, then a Foreign Office Minister, wrote that while the Government was extremely concerned about Hussain — a volunteer private in the 3rd Battalion Yorkshire Volunteers — it had “no formal consular responsibility for him nor any formal right to consular access”.
JAIL TERMS
At least 241 people were sentenced to death last year; 31 were executed
Last year 7,213 men and 33 women were on death row
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has alleged that up to 12 inmates have been kept in cells intended for one
Murder victims’ families may accept compensation and pardon the offender
In November 2004 Asif Mahmood, who had spent 15 years on death row, was found innocent and released. His appeal had been pending for 13 years
Execution is carried out by hanging
