By Aamir Latif
KARACHI, Pakistan
A Pakistani Taliban group said Thursday they would kill more children if the government went ahead with its plans to hang a key terrorist commander.
Terrorist Mohammad Aqeel, who uses the alias Dr. Usman, was the lone survivor of a brazen attack on Pakistan Army’s General Headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi in 2009.
Officials say Aqeel may be hanged soon, possibly in the next few hours.
Aqeel was said to be the operational chief of the attack and was caught injured, while nine of his accomplices were killed in an hours long gunbattle with troops. He was reportedly a former soldier with Pakistan Army’s medical corps.
A military court awarded the death penalty to Aqeel in 2009.
In the aftermath of the deadly Peshawar attack on an army-run school recently, Army Chief General Raheel Sharif signed the death warrants for six militants, including Aqeel Thursday. This will be the first hanging in Pakistan since 2008.
The country imposed a de facto ban on capital punishment following pressure from the European Union reportedly to get trade and export relaxations.
A spokesman of a Pakistani Taliban group, Muhammad Khurrasani, said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s family and children of Pakistan Army generals would have to bear the consequences if Aqeel or any other high-profile militant was hanged.
Khurrasani made the threat in a statement on behalf of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, a conglomerate of different terrorist groups in Pakistan.
“We want to make it clear that if you hang any Taliban member, then we will take revenge by targeting your young children,” he said.
He tried to justify the killings of the children of army personnel by saying they didn’t “condemn the devilish acts of their fathers.”
The spokesman also rejected various decrees issued by several religious scholars in Pakistan who strongly condemned the recent Peshawar carnage.
Also Friday, the Pakistan army killed 91 militants in four separate clashes across the country, according to the army's media wing.
A gun-and-bomb terrorist attack on an army-run school in northwestern Pakistan’s Peshawar city killed over 140 people, mostly students, on Dec. 16.
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