The Observer, London
Rory McCarthy in Islamabad
Sunday August 5, 2001

The military regime in Pakistan is preparing to execute a young, illiterate woman convict this week despite mounting concerns from human rights groups about the fairness of her tial.

Rubina Ansari, 24, was due to be hanged last month, but the Supreme Court gave her a last-minute stay of execution after the government came under pressure to commute the sentence to imprisonment for life.

If Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, does not reduce the sentence, she will be hanged as early as tomorrow. She would be the first woman to be executed in Pakistan for 16 years.

Ansari was arrested in December 1998 and charged with the murder of Hajjan Aziz Begum, a wealthy, 70-yer-old woman, in Sargodha, 120 miles south of Islamabad. The court was told Ansari had met the woman while she was travelling home on a bus during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

She invited the woman back to her home to break her fast at the end of the day. Once she was inside she allegedly attacked the old woman with an axe, cut off her hand and mutilated her body.

The prosecution said she stole the woman's gold necklaces and bangles, left the body in her home and hid the jewellery at her sister's house But Ansari denied the murder and insisted that she was not at home at the time of the killing.

Rights groups in Pakistan have raised serious concerns about the trial. All evidence against Ansari was circumstantial. No fingerprints were taken and no evidence was given to place her at the scene of the murder. The only witnesses produced were police officers or relatives of the victim. No defence witnesses were called.

Ansari was four months pregnant when she was arrested and suffered a miscarriage in jail. She claims she was beaten and tortured by police. Her sister, Shamma, 21, was arrested at the same time. She too was pregnant and also miscarried while in police custody. She was later acquitted.

'Both the women were clearly treated in a cruel and inhumane way,' said Ansar Burney, a leading Pakistani human rights campaigner who met Ansari in jail last month.

He said she was now sharing a cell with four other women condemned to die. In total, 24 women in Multan's women's jail are on death row. Burney's legal petition last month convinced the Supreme Court to delay the execution and he has spent the past week in London in meetings with Amnesty International and other organisations.

The authorities at Multan's women's jail, where Ansari is due to hang, face a further problem. Some religious groups have complained that, under Islamic laws, a female should not be executed by a man. But Pakistan possesses no female executioners.

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