The Pakistani prime minister lifted a moratorium on the death penalty on Wednesday, a day after Taliban gunmen attacked a school, killing 132 students and nine teachers, a government spokesman said.
Pakistan began three days of mourning on Wednesday for the 141 people killed in the attack on the school in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
The bloodshed has shocked the nation and put pressure on the government to do more to tackle the Pakistani Taliban insurgency. Many people have called in the media for the death penalty to be restored.
An army soldier gestures on Wednesday as his comrades enter Army Public School, which was attacked the previous dayy by Taliban gunmen, in Peshawar. (Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)
"It was decided that this moratorium should be lifted. The prime minister approved," said government spokesman Mohiuddin Wan, referring to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's approval of the decision by a ministerial committee.
"Black warrants will be issued within a day or two," he said, referring to execution orders.
He did not give any details about who might be executed under such orders.
A moratorium on the death penalty was imposed in 2008 and only one execution has taken place since then.
There are believed to be more than 8,000 prisoners on death row in Pakistan, about 10 percent convicted of offences labelled "terrorism", said Justice Project Pakistan, a legal aid group.
"Terrorism" has a very broad definition under Pakistani law. About 17,000 cases of "terrorism" are pending in special courts.
Justice Project Pakistan released a report on Wednesday saying that those convicted of terrorism were often tortured into confessions or denied lawyers, and that recent crackdowns had not stopped militant attacks.
"Swathes of defendants whose crimes bear no relation to terrorism have been sentenced to death following extremely unfair trials - whilst terrorist attacks continue unabated," the group said.
Pakistanis mourned as mass funerals got underway Wednesday for 142 people, most of them children, killed the day before in a massacre by the Taliban at a military-run school in the country's troubled northwest.
Indian schoolchildren pray at their school in Mumbai on Wednesday, in memory of schoolchildren killed during an attack on an army school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar by armed Taliban terrorists. (Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images)
Prayer vigils were held across the nation and in other schools, students spoke of their shock at the carnage in the city of Peshawar, where seven Taliban gunmen, explosives strapped to their bodies, scaled a back wall using a ladder to get into the Army Public School and College in the morning hours on Tuesday.
Most of the 132 children and 10 school staff members killed in the attack were to be buried Wednesday, the Associated Press reported, which is the beginning of a three-day mourning period declared by the government.
Even Taliban militants in neighbouring Afghanistan decried the killing spree, calling it "un-Islamic."
In neighbouring India, which has long accused Pakistan of supporting anti-India guerrillas, schools on Wednesday observed two minutes of silence for the Peshawar victims at the urging of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who called the attack "a senseless act of unspeakable brutality."
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