Pakistan Hangs Killer Despite 'Underage' Claim

Pakistan has hanged a man whose case attracted international attention after claims he was arrested as a teenager and tortured into confessing to murder.

"Shafqat Hussain was this morning executed in Pakistan, despite widespread calls, both within and outside the country, for a stay,” said legal aid group Justice Project Pakistan.

An official at Karachi Central Jail also confirmed the hanging.

Hussain was convicted in 2004 for killing a child but his family said he was only 14 at the time and was tortured into a confession.

They claim police pulled out his fingernail and burned him with cigarettes.

"There are cigarette burns on his shoulder," his brother Manzoor told reporters the day before he was hanged.

"They also burned his ankles with a heated rod. Those scars are still there. You can go and see them."

Pakistani law does not allow the execution of people arrested when under 18 but officials insisted he was an adult at the time.

His family said they had no official record of his birth - not uncommon for poor families – and much of the legal battle revolved around trying to confirm his age.

The execution had already been stayed several times as lawyers tried to obtain proof of his birth.

United Nations rights experts said that Hussain "did not receive a fair trial and ... the state-appointed lawyer never raised the fact that he was a child at the time of the alleged offence, nor did he introduce any evidence or call any witnesses in his defence".

Hussain’s mother told the Reuters news agency she could only afford one trip to see her son in all the time he was in jail.

Pakistan has executed nearly 200 people since a moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in December after the Taliban massacre of children at a school in Peshawar.

Only Iran and China have executed more. Some 8,000 people are thought to be on death row in Pakistan, according to human rights groups Amnesty International and Reprieve.

The European Union and the United Nations are urging Pakistan to reinstate the moratorium on the death penalty.