WASHINGTON, Nov 5: A Pakistani national convicted of killing two CIA employees outside the agency’s Virginia headquarters in 1993 is slated for execution on Nov 14.
Mir Aimal Kasi, an ethnic Pakhtoon from Pakistan’s Balochistan province, is trying to delay the execution through a Pakistan-based lawyer, Iqbal Geoffrey.
He was convicted of shooting dead Frank Darling and Lansing Bennet outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., on Jan 25, 1993. The day after the attack he took a Pakistan International Airlines flight from New York to Pakistan, where he disappeared in the semi-autonomous tribal area.
The United States asked the Pakistan government for Kasi’s extradition under a 1931 treaty signed between the US and the then-colonial power, Great Britain. On June 15, 1997, Kasi was arrested by Pakistani and US agents from a tribal hideout in southern Pakistan.
The informers, who remain unidentified, earned a reward of $2 million from the US government. Kasi’s counsel Geoffrey has appealed to both Virginia and federal courts, arguing that his client was denied due process of justice because his “abduction” from Pakistan was illegal.
As the execution drew near, the counsel also sent an appeal to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, arguing that Kasi was being executed in violation of the norms of international human rights laws which the US was bound to respect.
He has contended that Kasi’s execution will amount to “cold-blooded state murder.” He has sent copies of his appeal to US Attorney General John Ashcroft and to other authorities. The counsel has also made efforts, all of them so far fruitless, to initiate action in Pakistan’s higher courts to halt the execution.
Kasi was earlier slated for execution on Nov 7, but it was postponed by a week. He is to be executed by electric chair at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarrat, Va., at 9pm Nov 14.
Talking to Pakistani journalists from his death row cell in a remote jail in rural Virginia in the summer of 2000, Kasi said he killed the CIA agents to avenge what he termed atrocities that the Americans had committed against the Muslims.
Kasi appeared cool and unrepentant. He blamed a former friend for tipping the US about his whereabouts but did not name him.
Kasi’s lawyers provided by the state of Virginia claimed that the treaty between the US and the UK (which was Pakistan’s colonial sovereign) should not have applied to his extradition from Pakistan to the US.
The treaty says that extradition is to be carried out according to the law of the country from which the prosecution seeks to extradite the defendant. Because the Supreme Court of Virginia and the US Supreme Court concluded that Kasi was not extradited, but was instead “kidnapped” by the FBI, they found that there was no violation of the treaty because the treaty did not even apply to his case.
Kasi has been on death row since Feb 6, 1998.