Pakistan has executed at least one person a day for 11 months

Family mourn the death of Aftab Bahadur, who was executed in June. He was just 15 when he was arrested. Reuters

Pakistan has executed 311 people since December 2014 when the death penalty was reintroduced, according to Ekklesia.

Excluding religious holidays, during which no executions take place, Pakistan's own records show that the country has executed at least one person a day for the last eleven months.

An anonymous Interior Ministry official said the country's total for hangings "now stands at 311" since December last year.

This number has been revealed two weeks after the Pakistani government said they have some 6,000 people on death row in their country. Pakistan's death row is believed to be the largest in the world.

However, this figure is 2,000 less than the 8,000 the Interior Ministry gave as an estimate at the beginning of the year.

Only 16, less than 0.6 per cent, of those executed since December had known links to terrorist organisations according to Reprieve, a legal and human rights organisation which has collated all the publically available data.

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There is substantiated concern that many of those on the country's death row were sentenced after unfair trials, as police torture and forced confessions are common in Pakistan.

There is also a fear that many of those who have been executed were under 18 at time of conviction, as more than 73 per cent of births are unregistered in Pakistan. A known example of this is the killing of Aftab Bahadur, who was 15 when he was arrested for a crime that all eye witnesses claim he was innocent of.

"The Pakistani government has no idea how many people it has on its death row, let alone how many are innocent or were sentenced to death as children," said Maya Foa, the head of the death penalty team at Reprieve.

She told Ekklesia: "It is appalling that the authorities are proceeding with executions at this rate. If they continue to execute one person a day, by the end of next year they will have killed nearly a thousand people – among whom there will almost certainly be a large number of juveniles, and innocent people tortured into 'confessing' to crimes they didn't commit. This senseless massacre will not make Pakistan any safer, and must be stopped."

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