In its unprecedented short order announced this week, the special court issued a death sentence to the former military ruler for high treason for subverting the country's constitution in 2007. Musharraf, 76, has been living in self-imposed exile since 2016 and is undergoing medical treatment in a Dubai hospital. Avoiding gaol basically.
The court has directed law enforcement officials to arrest the "fugitive-convict" to ensure the death sentence is carried out. But "if found dead, corpse be dragged to the D-Chowk, Islamabad, Pakistan, and be hanged for 03 days," the ruling said, referring to a place just outside the national Parliament.
Top government officials told a hurriedly called news conference Thursday evening that they had decided to initiate legal proceedings against Judge Waqar Ahmad Seth for issuing a "despicable order" that they said was in violation of the constitution.
"Our plea is that such a judge has got no authority to be a judge of any high court or the Supreme Court ... . [H]e must immediately be stopped from performing his official duties," said Pakistani Law Minister Farogh Naseem. This statement is honestly a beaut. I wish we could use it for so many others.
Neither the constitution nor Islam allows public hangings, the minister said.
Prominent Supreme Court attorney Aitzaz Ahsan compared the special court's ruling with the harsh Islamic justice of the radical Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan in the late 1990s, where public hangings and executions were common.
The rest of it's at VOA... but this is enough.
Maulana Fazlur Rehman
...Pak dynastic politician, brother of PM Nawaz Sharif, chief minister of Punjab...
"For my withdrawal, I will have to take into confidence five parties," said the JUI chief, whose party is one-fifth of the Muttahida Majlis‐e‐Amal (MMA) ‐ a religiopolitical alliance.
...the creepy-looking former dictator of Pakistain. Zia was an Islamic nutball who imposed his nutballery on the rest of the country with the enthusiastic assistance of the nation's religious parties, which are populated by other nutballs. He was appointed Chief of Army Staff in 1976 by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he hanged when he seized power. His time in office was a period of repression, with hundreds of thousands of political rivals, minorities, and journalists executed or tortured, including senior general officers convicted in coup-d'état plots, who would normally be above the law. As part of his alliance with the religious parties, his government helped run the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, providing safe havens, American equipiment, Saudi money, and Pak handlers to selected mujaheddin. Zia died along with several of his top generals and admirals and the then United States Ambassador to Pakistain Arnold Lewis Raphel when he was assassinated in a suspicious air crash near Bahawalpur in 1988...