ISLAMABAD, 17 November 2006 — President Pervez Musharraf has commuted the death sentence of Briton Mirza Tahir Hussain, who has spent 18 years in a Pakistani jail for a murder he says he didn’t commit, and officials were hopeful he would be released soon.
According to laws in Pakistan a person could go free If the prisoner has spent seven years in jail. Life imprisonment is 14 years, but days and nights are counted not as one but two days, thus increasing the chances of the prisoner being released after completing seven years. Now it will be up to the jail authorities to calculate the time spent by Mirza before arriving at a decision.
The British government and rights groups had pleaded with Pakistan to grant clemency for Mirza, 36, from Leeds in northern England. “The president has commuted the death sentence to life,” Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said, adding that his ministry was working out the modalities of his release. Mirza’s family welcomed the news, saying their “18 years of nightmare appears to be coming to an end.”
“It has been an emotional rollercoaster for the family. We have been looking forward to this day,” his brother Amjad Hussain told reporters in England. “We are overjoyed.”
Musharraf took the decision on Wednesday, officials said. “Hopefully he will be granted total relief. He will be informed about it today,” Junior Information Minister Tariq Azim Khan told Reuters.
Mirza, a British Muslim of Pakistani descent, was convicted of killing a taxi driver in Islamabad in 1988. He said the man had tried to sexually assault him and then threatened him with a gun, which went off when they struggled.
The taxi driver’s family was furious. Their lawyer said they would petition the Supreme Court to stop Mirza’s release. “The wrath of God on those who pardoned him,” said Saifullah Khan, grandfather of the driver, Jamshed Khan.
“When we heard this, we felt as if he had been killed again. Only those who have lost their children can know this pain,” he said.
Gray-bearded and overweight after spending half his life in jail, Hussain bears little resemblance to the slim 18-year-old who set out to visit his family’s ancestral homeland.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair, who according to Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry is due to visit Islamabad in the next week, said Musharraf’s role in resolving the case was welcomed.
“The prime minister, like the foreign secretary, welcomes the decision by President Musharraf to commute the sentence of Mirza Tahir Hussain,” Blair’s spokesman said. Blair had raised the matter with Musharraf in London in September.
Prince Charles, who had also discussed the case with Musharraf during a visit to Pakistan in October, said in a statement he was “very pleased” with the decision.
Mirza was originally acquitted by Pakistan’s High Court, but an Islamic court sentenced him to death in 1998. The sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003, and a review petition was rejected a year later. But the government had put off his execution several times, most recently until the end of the year, and officials said they were trying to find a way to spare him.
Authorities had hoped a blood-money settlement, permitted under Islamic law, could be reached with the dead man’s family. But the relatives had refused to negotiate, saying to do so would be dishonorable.
Rights groups and British parliamentarians said Mirza was the victim of a miscarriage of justice, as did the dissenting judge in the Islamic court that convicted him.
— With input from agencies
