Chaudhry Arshad Saeed Arain, a senior prisons official, said the executed men were brothers Muhammad Imran and Muhammad Luqman, convicted over the murder of a man in Islamabad in 1996; and Raheel Ahmed, who gunned down a man in 1994.
The government unveiled a sweeping plan to curb militancy after Taliban attackers gunned down more than 150 people, most of them children, at an army-run school in Peshawar in December 2014.
A six-year moratorium on the death penalty was lifted and the constitution amended to allow military courts to try those accused of carrying out attacks.
The number of known executions worldwide rose more than 50 percent last year to at least 1,634, the highest figure recorded since 1989, Amnesty International said in a report Wednesday — with the surge largely fuelled by Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
“Over the past year, Pakistan has vaulted to the number three spot for recorded state executions in the world — a shameful position no one should aspire to,” Champa Patel, director of Amnesty’s South Asia office, told AFP.
Pakistan executed 326 people last year, Patel said.
“Most of those executed were not convicted of terror-related offences, and there is evidence that at least two and possibly more of them were juveniles when they committed their alleged crimes.”
The overwhelming majority of those hanged since the government fully restored the death penalty in March 2015 had no links to terrorism, said Sarah Belal, director of the Justice Project Pakistan which advocates the abolition of hanging and represents death row convicts.
She said weaknesses in the judicial system and a lack of fair trials raised the possibility that many sent to the gallows were innocent, underage at the time of their crimes or mentally ill.The number of executions carried out worldwide reached a 25-year high last year due to a dramatic rise in the number of people being put to death in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, according to new research.
At least 1,634 people were executed in 2015, a rise of 54 per cent on the year before, Amnesty International’s annual global review of the death penalty found. It is the highest total recorded by the charity since 1989 and does not include figures from China, where thousands of people are likely to have been executed in secret.
The surge in deaths, which Amnesty described as “profoundly disturbing”, was largely driven by a ramping up of executions in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Iran killed at least 977 people in 2015, the vast majority for drug-related crimes, a rise of almost a third on the previous year. At least four of those killed were under 18 when they committed their alleged crimes.
