KARACHI, 22 February 2006 — Eleven people have been sentenced to death by an anti-terror court for an attack on a top military official in Karachi that killed 11 people.
All the convicts belonged to Jund Allah, a shadowy group experts say has ties with Al-Qaeda.
The extremists were found guilty of firing on the car of Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat, the then corps commander of Karachi, as he drove through the city in his motorcade on June 10, 2004.
Saleem survived the shooting and later became deputy chief of the Pakistani Army, but at least seven soldiers, three policemen and a passer-by died in the hail of bullets.
The ambush was in response to a security force operation in South Waziristan, around 400 km southwest of Islamabad, where hundreds of people have died in clashes between the Pakistani Army and militants in the past two years.
“The prosecution has produced witnesses, the charges against you have been proven and you are hereby sentenced to death,” Judge Feroz Mehmood Bhatti told the men as he announced the verdict to the court in Karachi.
The convicts shouted “Allah-o-Akbar” (God is Greatest) and “We will accept death punishment even if it is awarded 10 times” as Bhatti finished reading the judgment.
The group’s ringleader, Attaur Rehman, told reporters after the verdict that the men would appeal against the verdict of the “kangaroo court.”
“That court was fake, it had no power,” he told reporters after the verdict. “We will appeal at the high court within seven days.”
“Tell Musharraf so that he can tell Bush that such punishments cannot block our way,” he added.
“One Attaur Rehman will die and another will be born.”
Like other militant groups, Jund Allah was enraged by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s close ties with his US counterpart George W. Bush and by Islamabad’s crackdown on extremism.
Members of Jund Allah were allegedly trained in camps run by Al-Qaeda in the rugged tribal area of South Waziristan near the Afghan border, where Pakistan’s military is engaged in an ongoing hunt for militants.
Prosecutor Maula Bakhsh Bhatti said the militants had confessed to carrying out the attack.
“The prosecution has proved its case and they themselves have confessed and declared that it is jihad (holy war),” he said.
The judge also ordered them to pay fines of 50,000 rupees ($833) each and pay twice as much to the relatives of those killed. Five other members of the group have been declared absconders in the case but were not sentenced.
Last year an anti-terrorism court jailed two Pakistani doctors for seven years for helping injured Al-Qaeda and Jund Allah militants.
Karachi’s crowded apartment blocks have been used as hideouts by several Al-Qaeda fugitives, including alleged Sept. 11 planners Ramzi Bin Al-Shaibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.
Musharraf himself escaped an assassination attempt in Karachi in April 2002. He survived two other bids to kill him, both in December 2003 in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.
