ISLAMABAD, 27 August 2005 — Five people, including a soldier, were sentenced to death for their involvement in a 2003 attempt to kill President Pervez Musharraf in which 15 people lost their lives.
Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said a low-ranking member of the army and four civilians were handed down the sentence a few days ago, but would not say which court heard the case.
The sentences relate to Christmas Day 2003, when two suicide bombers rammed explosives-laden vehicles into Musharraf’s motorcade in Rawalpindi.
“Five people have been given the death sentence,” Sultan told AFP. It was the second attempt on Musharraf’s life that month. A soldier linked to the other plot — the bombing of a Rawalpindi bridge seconds after Musharraf’s convoy passed on Dec. 14, 2003 — was hanged on Saturday.
Both attacks were allegedly masterminded by the Al-Qaeda network, which opposed Musharraf’s support for the US-led campaign to oust the Taleban regime in neighboring Afghanistan in late 2001.
All five have the right to appeal their sentences. The final word will rest with Musharraf himself.
The soldier who was sentenced for the Christmas Day attempt was named as Naik Arshad Mahmood, and the civilians were named as Zubair Ahmed, Rashid Qureshi, Ghulam Sarwar Bhatti and Akhlas Ahmed.
Sultan said another three people convicted of involvement in the plot were jailed. Rana Mohammad Naveed was sentenced to life imprisonment, Adnan Khan got 15 years behind bars and Aamir Sohail 20 years.
“I cannot say where the case was tried,” the military spokesman added. “They were tried under the relevant provisions of law.”
Pakistani authorities in September shot dead local Al-Qaeda lynchpin Amjad Farooqi, a co-planner in the Christmas Day attempt on Musharraf’s life.
In May, Pakistani forces captured Libyan national Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, the Al-Qaeda’s alleged number three. Musharraf has publicly accused Al-Libbi of leading the two failed bids to assassinate him.
Al-Libbi has since been handed over to the custody of the United States.
Last year three extremists were sentenced to 10 years’ hard labor for an earlier plot in Karachi in April 2002, when a remote-control device failed to detonate an explosives-laden van near the president’s motorcade.
On Saturday, officials said former Pakistani soldier Islam Siddiqui, 35, was hanged before dawn in central Pakistan’s Multan prison, for involvement in the Dec. 14 attempt. Musharraf turned down his appeal for clemency.
The general narrowly survived that attack because a high-tech jamming device on the president’s Mercedes had delayed the explosions of five bombs. No one was injured in the attack. In May, a Pakistani Air Force official who escaped from jail late last year after being sentenced to death for the same plot was re-arrested.
