Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf sentenced to death by special court for high treason Tuesday Dec 17,2019

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was on Tuesday Dec 17,2019 sentenced to death for high treason by a special court. He is the first former military ruler to have been tried and convicted for treason.

The death penalty to Pervez Musharraf was, however, awarded in absentia. He has not returned to Pakistan since 2016. He is in Dubai receiving treatment for a rare health condition called Amyloidosis.

Given his high connections in the Emirates, it is highly unlikely that Pervez Musharraf would be extradited to Pakistan for execution of the death sentence

For the record, there were four more cases in which Pervez Musharraf's name figured. These were assassination of Baloch leader Akbar Bugti in 2006, assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007, putting around 60 judges under arrest in 2007 and killing of a cleric in much publicised Red Mosque siege in Islamabad in 2007

The case, along with a bunch of others, was filed against him in 2013 after his return to Pakistan from four years of self-imposed exile to run for parliament to “save” the troubled nuclear-armed state. In this, he faced charges for suspending, subverting and abrogating the Constitution, imposing an emergency in the country in November 2007 and detaining judges of Pakistan’s superior courts.

Musharraf, who had left Pakistan soon after he stepped down as President in 2008, exited the country a second time in March 2016 for “medical treatment”. He was declared an absconder in this case.

Musharraf was indicted on March 31, 2014, and the prosecution had tabled the entire evidence before the special court in September the same year. But the trial lingered on.

The special court, headed by Peshawar High Court Chief Justice Waqar Ahmad Seth, had announced that it would deliver its verdict in the case on Tuesday.

However, the government’s prosecutor, Advocate Ali Zia Bajwa, said that they had submitted three petitions. One of the petitions asks that the court make three individuals - former Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar and former Law Minister Zahid Hamid - suspects in the case.