By ISMAIL KHAN
Published: May 23, 2012
...A tribal court here found the doctor, Shakil Afridi, (click here) guilty of acting against the state, said Mutahir Zeb Khan, the administrator for the Khyber tribal region. Along with the jail term, the court imposed a fine of $3,500. Dr. Afridi, who may appeal the verdict, was then sent to Central Prison in Peshawar.
He had been charged under a British-era regulation for frontier crimes that unlike the Pakistan criminal code does not carry the death penalty for treason. Under Pakistani penal law, he almost certainly would have received the death penalty, a Pakistani lawyer said....
No sovereign nation can respect this decision by Pakistan to say Mr. Afridi acted against the state. That would indicate Pakistan willingly protected the most dangerous international criminal in the world. And the USA wants routes through this country? You've got to be joking. There needs to be sanctions placed on Pakistan until there is a reasonable government in that country rather than anarchy empowered by archaic law that has no place in the 21st century. This is outrageous. Mr. Afridi should be pardoned for his bravery in acting to end the life of the Pakistan's ruler of terror.
Pakistan is an illegal nuclear power that is out of control both internally and internationally. They are a danger to the global security and the country needs to be treated as such.
The top of the government of the United States of America sat huddled together to supervise the final act resulting from the bravery of Mr. Afridi to stop an international criminal responsible for killing thousands of people, assaulting government installations on multiple continents, including, the London Bombing, the Madrid Bombing, attacks against US military instillation and deploying trained members of al Qaeda to seek to kill more innocent civilians on airlines and Pakistan jails the man.
Osama bin Laden took a religious sect that has no legitimate ties to Islam or the Quran and dominated killings and fear in a region of the world that cannot recover a stable government and this is the result? Pakistan and Afghanistan are in ruins with generation after generation of war weary citizens facing chronic impoverishment, disease and desperate lives. Has Pakistan no interest in the future of their children? This is not the Zadari I know. Has the will of the people of Pakistan diminished so much that the memory of Benizar Bhutto is lost to brutal regimes seeking power rather than prosperity?
This decision, to treat a hero as a criminal, is wrong. It is more than wrong, it is profoundly wrong.
The top of the government of the United States of America sat huddled together to supervise the final act resulting from the bravery of Mr. Afridi to stop an international criminal responsible for killing thousands of people, assaulting government installations on multiple continents, including, the London Bombing, the Madrid Bombing, attacks against US military instillation and deploying trained members of al Qaeda to seek to kill more innocent civilians on airlines and Pakistan jails the man.
Osama bin Laden took a religious sect that has no legitimate ties to Islam or the Quran and dominated killings and fear in a region of the world that cannot recover a stable government and this is the result? Pakistan and Afghanistan are in ruins with generation after generation of war weary citizens facing chronic impoverishment, disease and desperate lives. Has Pakistan no interest in the future of their children? This is not the Zadari I know. Has the will of the people of Pakistan diminished so much that the memory of Benizar Bhutto is lost to brutal regimes seeking power rather than prosperity?
This decision, to treat a hero as a criminal, is wrong. It is more than wrong, it is profoundly wrong.
