June 28
PAKISTAN:
Pakistan Rape Victim Wins First Round in Appeal
Pakistan's Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the re-arrest of 13 men
accused of involvement in the gang-rape of a woman in 2002, pending the
outcome of the rape victim's appeal in the high-profile case.
The rape of Mukhtaran Mai and the subsequent acquittal of five of the 6
men convicted of attacking her provoked an international outcry and
focused attention on the plight of women in rural Pakistan.
Mai is appealing in the Supreme Court against the acquittal of the men by
a provincial court in March.
A 3-judge Supreme Court bench on Tuesday suspended the ruling of the
provincial high court overturning the convictions and ordered the arrest
of all of the accused.
"They shall be treated as under-trial prisoners," said Iftikhar Mohammad
Chaudhry, Pakistan's acting chief justice, in a brief order.
Mai, 33, was gang-raped on the orders of the traditional village council
after her brother -- who was 12 at the time -- was judged to have offended
the honor of a powerful clan by befriending a woman from the tribe.
Feudal and tribal laws still hold sway in many rural areas of predominantly
Muslim Pakistan. 6 men were originally convicted of the crime and
sentenced to death, but 5 were acquitted after appealing to a high court
in Punjab province, which cited a lack of evidence.
The 6th man had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The
other 5 have remained in detention despite the March ruling overturning
their conviction.
In her appeal to the Supreme Court, Mai had also called for the trial of
8 men who served on the village council that ordered her to be raped.
They have also been in detention for several months.
Mai sat quietly through the court proceedings but reacted with excitement
as her supporters explained the court's decision.
"I'm very happy. God willing, justice will be done in future as well," she
told Reuters as she hugged her supporters including members of
non-governmental organizations.
Human rights workers had wanted Mai to go abroad to speak on the plight of
women but the government, saying it was acting in the interest of her
security, recently banned her from overseas travel and seized her passport.
Following protests from various quarters, including the U.S. government, the
ban was lifted and Mai said the government returned her passport on Sunday,
although she said had no immediate plans to travel abroad.
A State Department spokesman said last week Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice raised the matter of Mai's freedom to travel with Pakistani Foreign
Minister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri.
President Pervez Musharraf, who has been trying to project Pakistan as a
moderate and progressive Muslim nation, has taken a personal interest in
Mai's case, saying it was tarnishing the country's image overseas.
(source: Reuters)
JAPAN:
Death sentence upheld in curry-arsenic mass murder
The Osaka High Court on Tuesday upheld the death sentence imposed on
Masumi Hayashi, the former insurance agent convicted of murdering 4
people with arsenic-laced curry in 1998 in a case based largely on
circumstantial evidence.
The case surrounding Hayashi, 43, has been highlighted by her months of
silence following her arrest and her history of using arsenic in insurance
scams.
She only started to talk after the Wakayama District Court sentenced her
to death in December 2002. Hayashi has appealed the ruling to the Supreme
Court.
The high court on Tuesday said Hayashi must have been the one who put
arsenic in a pot of curry that was later eaten by people at a summer
festival in Wakayama Prefecture on July 25, 1998. Four people died,
including two children, and 63 others were sickened.
"There is no mistake about the fact that the accused was in charge of
watching the curry pot alone in the afternoon on the day of the crime,"
Presiding Judge Kazuhisa Shirai said. The ruling thus rejected Hayashi's
contention that she had no opportunity to lace the curry because she was
there with her second daughter.
The judge accepted the credibility of the witnesses' statements, although
Hayashi said they were wrong.
Residents testified that they saw her alone with the curry pot, wearing a
white T-shirt with a towel around her neck.
Other witnesses for the prosecutors said they saw Hayashi open the lid of
the pot and then throw her head back to avoid the steam.
Hayashi denied she was alone with the pot, saying, "I was with my second
daughter all along while watching the curry."
She also said she was wearing a black T-shirt on the day in question. Her
defense team said, "The residents mistakenly thoughtthe second daughter
was the accused." But Judge Shirai said Hayashi manipulated the facts of
the case to work in her favor, or simply lied about the facts themselves.
As for the motive, the high court ruling said it is most natural to assume
the defendant committed the crime after feeling estranged by her neighbors
in the garage where they were cooking curry. But the ruling added that it
would be impossible to find the truth because Hayashi has refused to come
clean.
The high court accepted the results of a study at SPring-8, the world's
most advanced radioactivity-examination facility. The results found a
"very high probability" that the arsenic collected from the curry and the
arsenic found on objects in Hayashi's kitchen were identical.
In addition, the high court noted that arsenic was relatively easy for
Hayashi to obtain because her husband used the poison in his
termite-extermination business.
Hayashi's behavior at the high court was markedly different than during
her trial at the Wakayama District Court.
After her arrest in October 1998, she refused to answer questions from
police and prosecutors. She remained silent during her trial.
After the district court sentenced her to death in December 2002, Hayashi
decided to speak up because she "needed to speak in my own words to avoid
being sentenced to death."
During the appeal at the high court, she testified for more than 10 hours.
It is extremely rare in the nation's judicial history for an accused to
exercise the constitutional right to remain silent after arrest, but then
decide to testify after being handed the death sentence.
The high court also upheld the district court's ruling that found her
guilty in connection with six cases of attempted murder and insurance
fraud.In one of the cases, Hayashi was convicted of attempting to kill her
husband, Kenji, 60, and their 42-year-old acquaintance.
Hayashi denied the charges, saying, "My husband and the male acquaintance
took arsenic on their own will after the 3 of us discussed how to receive
disability insurance money."
Kenji Hayashi also testified, "I took about half an earpick of arsenic by
myself."(An earpick is a tiny spoon used to clean the ear.)
But the high court upheld the conviction, again saying that Masumi Hayashi
was manipulating the facts in the case.
"Now that 5 years have passed since the indictment, it is easy for the
accused to defend herself by juggling the information," the judge said. "
The judge also doubted the credibility of her husband's statement, saying
that Hayashi's lawyers had sent trial records containing his wife's
testimony to Kenji before he took the stand.
"It is obvious that he testified in accordance with the records he
received from the defense lawyers," the judge said.
But the high court agreed with the lower court's verdict of not guilty in
connection with the attempted murder of a former employee of her husband's
termite-extermination company in 1987.
"Doubts still remain over the prosecutors' claim that the accused had the
employee eat an okonomiyaki pancake laced with arsenic," Shirai said.This
is the only case in which Hayashi was found not guilty.
(source: The Asahi Shimbun)
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Hiroshima High Court upholds death sentence for wild killing spree
The Hiroshima High Court on Tuesday upheld a lower court death sentence
handed to a man for killing 5 and injuring 10 others when he went on a
berserk rampage at JR Shimonoseki Station in 1999.
Yasuaki Uwabe, 41, was convicted of driving his car into the concourse of
the station in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture in September 1999, and
hitting 3 people, killing 2 of them.
Jumping out of the vehicle, Uwabe then began attacking innocent bystanders
with a knife. The slashing spree left another 3 people dead.
Lawyers for Uwabe said that he should be acquitted because they said the
man believed at the time that society was hostile toward him and thus was
mentally incompetent.
But the high court dismissed the lawyers' claims and ruled Uwabe could be
held responsible for his actions.
"Divorce and despair for the future led him to commit the crimes. He was
capable of being responsible for the crimes," the high court's judge said.
(source: Mainichi Daily News)
SUDAN:
SUDANESE REBEL FACES EXECUTION
The human rights group, Sudanese Organisation Against Torture says it has
been informed that a member of the minority Fur tribe, who live in the
troubled Dafur region, is about to be executed by Sudanese authorities.
SOAT says that 32 year old Altayib Ali Ahmed is scheduled to be executed
today in Kober Prison, Karthoum.
Mr Altayib was arrested on suspicion of working for and joining the rebel
opposition and helping to organise an attack on Al Fashir airport in Dafur
in April last year.
He was sentenced to death in January last year on charged including waging
war against the state, armed robbery, and undermining the constitution.
SOAT says some of the charges were later dropped under an amnesty but not
enough to stop Mr Altayibs execution.
SOAT has strongly condemned the Government of Sudan and says its gravely
concerned about Mr Altayib.
SOAT has also questioned the procedures of the Special Courts, through
which he was convicted and say they fall far short of international
standards of fair trials.
(source: The World News)
CHINA:
Bonfires, executions mark anti-drug day in Asia
Asian countries marked the 18th anniversary of the UN-sponsored
International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking on Sunday by
burning masses of confiscated narcotics and, in some cases, executing
drug traffickers.
The Chinese authorities on Sunday ordered the execution of at least 24
people for drug-related crimes in the southern city of Guizhou. According
to local media, 5 of them were to be immediately executed.
Chinese officials in Tibet destroyed some 500 kilograms of illicit drugs -
including 67kg of heroin, 320kg of poppy shell and seeds, and 133kg of
marijuana hemp - to mark the international anti-drug campaign in the
capital Lhasa on Sunday.
The Burmese military junta burned more than US$328 million worth of
illicit drugs on Sunday to showcase its counter-narcotics efforts.
Indias Narcotics Control Bureau Zonal Director AP Siddiqui claimed on
Sunday that the trafficking of narcotics in his country had declined in
the last couple of years. He urged social and human rights organizations
to launch a vigorous, nation-wide awareness campaign to reduce drug use
and trafficking.
In Afghanistan, the authorities - struggling with a narcotics trade that
has been making a comeback since the US-led overthrow of the Taliban -
torched some 30 tons of illicit drugs.
13 tons of opium, nine tons of hashish, 2 tons of heroin, and 6 tons
of other narcotics were burned in the capital, Kabul.
In neighboring Pakistan, authorities in Karachi set fire to more than 20t
of illegal narcotics seized by the coast guard.
In a message to mark the occasion, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned
that drugs were little more than tickets to a dead end.
The Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which
is planning to publish its annual report in Stockholm in this week,
estimated that 200 million people worldwide use illicit drugs - 40 million
of whom are addicted.
(source: ISN)
