Yesterday, Amnesty International featured Mr Asghar’s case in a new report revealing more than 19,000 people are on death row worldwide.
Source/Credit: Scotsman | UK
By Shân Ross | April 1, 2015
The lawyer representing a mentally-ill British grandfather on death row has said his family is becoming increasingly desperate at the lack of action to free him.
Last night, Aamer Anwar, lawyer for Mohammad Asghar, a grandfather from Edinburgh, sentenced to death in Pakistan last January after being convicted of blasphemy for writing letters signing himself the Prophet Mohammed, said the family was suffering “extreme anguish” at the situation.
Four months before Mr Asghar’s arrest in Rawalpindi in September 2010, the pensioner was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Edinburgh. Despite the diagnosis, the Pakistani court ruled Mr Asghar, a British national, was sane.
His appeal was pending before the Lahore High Court at the end of the year and he remained in hospital at that stage.
Mr Anwar believes his client is at risk of being killed if returned to prison because of the blasphemy charge.
Yesterday, Amnesty International featured Mr Asghar’s case in a new report revealing more than 19,000 people are on death row worldwide.
Mr Anwar said: “Mr Asghar’s family is becoming increasingly desperate and frustrated. It has now been over a year since he was sentenced to death and all this time has passed with discussions going on involving the prime ministers of both countries and officials behind the scenes.
“The authorities know that this is a severely mentally-ill man whose case should never have gone through the court process. The moratorium on executions was lifted in Pakistan last month and that is a source of real concern. It is a shocking state of affairs. We know the authorities are well aware of Mr Asghar’s mental illness which proves he should never stand trial.
“The problem is that we seemed to have reached an impasse despite high-level discussions and proof being provided.”
There have been intense fears for Mr Asghar’s safety and repeated calls for him to be freed since he was shot and wounded by a guard at the Rawalpindi prison where he was being held in September last year.
The Amnesty report concluded that Mr Asghar, who is in his 70s, was one of at least 19,094 people under a death sentence by the end of 2014.
There was a 28 per cent increase in the number of death sentences last year compared to the previous year, the campain group said.
Salil Shetty, secretary general of Amnesty International, said: “In a year when abhorrent summary executions by armed groups were branded on the global consciousness like never before, it is appalling that governments are themselves resorting to more executions in a knee-jerk reaction to combat terrorism and crime.
“It is shameful that so many states around the world are essentially playing with people’s lives – putting people to death for ‘terrorism’ or to quell internal instability on the ill-conceived premise of deterrence.”
Another Briton on death row is Cheltenham grandmother Lindsay Sandiford, who is in jail under a death sentence in Indonesia following a 2013 drug trafficking conviction over cocaine found in the lining of her suitcase.
Read original post here: Pakistan death row Scot’s family are ‘desperate’
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It's usually hard to argue with a lunatic and harder still to argue with a nation of lunatics. But I'm never the one to give up. So here I go.
ReplyDeleteNo Muslim in his right mind would even think of impersonating Prophet Muhammad, because even trying to be like him is trying enough, ask people who try to follow Sunnah and fall miserably short. Then there are rigors that the Prophet faced waiting for anyone who dares claim to be the Prophet himself. For a start claiming to be Prophet Muhammad is a blatant lie against God and then it's a blatant lie against reason, as no one can be another person.
So, there you go, the man named "Mohammad Asghar" if he calls himself "Prophet Muhammad" is clearly crazy. Now crazy people do all sorts of crazy things, such as saying, believing and doing things that don't stand to reason. Things such as, God cannot speak now and God cannot appoint prophets at His Will, burning houses of people for believing that God does as He pleases and lynching people for having beliefs different from prevalent crazy ideas.
Now I think God has shown a lot of restraint and not punished the nation of loonies who do all that I have alluded to above. All God needed to do was let one of the super loonies from TTP have access to radioactive materials and given him knowhow of how to use it to spread illness death and pain in Pakistan.
So, here's the question: Shouldn't the nation of loonies be kind to one of their kind, only slightly different? I think they should. For their own sakes, if not for His.
It's usually hard to argue with a lunatic and harder still to argue with a nation of lunatics. But I'm never the one to give up. So here I go.
ReplyDeleteNo Muslim in his right mind would even think of impersonating Prophet Muhammad, because even trying to be like him is trying enough, ask people who try to follow Sunnah and fall miserably short. Then there are rigors that the Prophet faced waiting for anyone who dares claim to be the Prophet himself. For a start claiming to be Prophet Muhammad is a blatant lie against God and then it's a blatant lie against reason, as no one can be another person.
So, there you go, the man named "Mohammad Asghar" if he calls himself "Prophet Muhammad" is clearly crazy. Now crazy people do all sorts of crazy things, such as saying, believing and doing things that don't stand to reason. Things such as, God cannot speak now and God cannot appoint prophets at His Will, burning houses of people for believing that God does as He pleases and lynching people for having beliefs different from prevalent crazy ideas.
Now I think God has shown a lot of restraint and not punished the nation of loonies who do all that I have alluded to above. All God needed to do was let one of the super loonies from TTP have access to radioactive materials and given him knowhow of how to use it to spread illness death and pain in Pakistan.
So, here's the question: Shouldn't the nation of loonies be kind to one of their kind, only slightly different? I think they should. For their own sakes, if not for his they should spare Mohammad Asghar.