Former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf has been sentenced to death. The court found the former military ruler with five treason charges including imposing emergency rule in 2007.
He was tried in absentia because he’s been living in exile since 2016. According to CNN, two of the three judges in a special court in Islamabad decided in favor of a death penalty in particular on the issue of unlawfully violating the constitution in 2007. He has been given an option to appeal the verdict.
Musharraf, who is 76 years old, has lived in a self-imposed exile in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates for over three years.
The former Pakistan president seized in a military coup in 1999 and has since ruled as the president until 2008.
Back in 2014, he was implicated on five treason charges including three counts of subverting, suspending and changing the country’s constitution, firing Pakistan’s chief justice, and imposing emergency rule.
Pakistan has recorded this for the first time in their history that an army chief has been tried and found guilty of treason. Under Pakistan’s constitution, high treason is a crime that carries the death penalty or life imprisonment.
Just after Pakistan’s supreme court lifted a travel ban allowing Musharraf to leave the country to seek medical treatment, he has been living in Dubai since 2016. Early this month in a video while in his hospital bed in Dubai, Musharraf said that he was innocent and that the treason case against him was baseless.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said that Musharraf “can surely never be a traitor” and that he had served the country for over 40 years.
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