Pakistani Punjab governor Taseer's killer sentenced to death

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's anti-terrorism court sentenced to death on Saturday the elite police guard who shot dead the former governor of Punjab Salman Taseer early this year. Taseer had been calling for reform of Pakistan's harsh blasphemy law.
Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, one of Taseer's elite police guards, assassinated the governor for his liberal and progressive views on January 4, when he was about to get into his car outside a restaurant in Islamabad.
Taseer's had called Pakistan's draconian blasphemy law --"a black law". His murder has put the country's liberal elite on the defensive. But what came afterwards was perhaps even more alarming: not a single cleric was ready to lead Taseer funeral prayers, dozens of lawyers showered roses on Qadri when he was first produced in the court, thousands of people demonstrated in his defence while most of the politicians could not openly condemn the murder.
Mr Qadri's trial, which began a month after the killing, was held in Rawalpindi's Adiala Jail and media was barred from covering the proceedings. Confessing that nobody intimidated him for Taseer's killing, Qadri told the court that the governor had criticized the blasphemy law and he deserved to be killed.
The ATC judge Pervez Ali Shah said that no one could be given the license to kill someone on any condition. Therefore, the killer cannot be pardoned as he has committed a heinous crime, the judge said before awarding two times death sentence to Mr Qadri.
Under Pakistani law, Qadri has the right to appeal within seven days against the verdict. One of Qadri's lawyers, Raja Shuja-ur-Rehman, said the defence would appeal the verdict. "We are not satisfied with the court's verdict, and we will file an appeal against it," he said.
When the death sentence was awarded, another defence lawyer Tariq Muhammad Dhamial said: "My client's morale was high. He was very happy with the decision and he accepts it as it means he has sacrificed his life for the Prophet Muhammad. He started reciting verses from the Koran after the verdict was read out."
As the news of Qadri's death sentence broke, dozens of his supporters gathered and protested outside the jail. "We will not let you down! We will free you! We will die for you!" the angry protesters, often referred by liberal elites as "Ghairat Brigade", were shouting.
Pakistan's blasphemy law has been in the spotlight since November 2010 when a court in Punjab's Nankana district sentenced a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, to death allegedly for using blasphemous remarks against the Prophet Muhammad. Taseer visited Asia Bibi in jail and championed her cause, saying that the controversial law was misused. He had also backed a bill in the country's parliament Sherry Rehman, a female MP, to amend the law to remove death penalty under blasphemy charges.
Two months after Taseer's death, minorities minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, a catholic Christian politician, was gunned down for his calls to amend the controversial law. Bhatti's murder shocked Pakistan and the government retracted from its early proposals to amend the blasphemy law.
Last August, Taseer's son Shahbaz Taseer was kidnapped from Lahore's upscale Gulberg area. No one has claimed responsibility for the crime but Taseer's family was threatened several times by the extremists. "Our family has been receiving threats from the Taliban and extremists. They could be behind the abduction of my brother," Sheharyar Taseer, Shahbaz's younger brother, had said.