KARACHI
Four more Taliban members were executed in Pakistan's Faisalabad city on Sunday afternoon, raising the total number of militants hanged to six in the last three days, authorities confirmed.
The executed militants, Ikhlas Ahmed, Ghulam Sarwar, Rashid Mehmood, and Zubair Ahmed were involved in a suicide attack on Pakistan's former military dictator General Pervez Musharraf in the garrison city of Rawalpindi in 2003.
"All the four terrorists were hanged -- one after another -- in Faisalabad central jail after the president rejected their mercy petitions on Friday," an interior ministry official told Anadolu Agency wishing not to be named.
Earlier, two key Taliban commanders, Mohammad Aqeel and Arshad Mehmood, who were also convicted of terrorism, were executed on Friday amid mounting pressure following a Taliban attack that killed 142 people, mostly children, in the city of Peshawar on Tuesday.
In the aftermath of the deadly Peshawar attack, President Mamnoon Hussein and Army Chief General Raheel Sharif have signed the death warrants for 23 militants convicted by both civilian and military courts. The remaining seventeen are likely to be hanged in coming days.
The country had imposed a de facto ban on capital punishment following pressure from the European Union reportedly to get trade and export relaxations.
Umbrella group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which claimed responsibility for the brutal Peshawar attack, has warned that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s family and children of army generals would have to bear the consequences if its members are hanged.
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