DHAKA: Pakistan hanged 12 male convicts on Tuesday, an interior ministry spokesman said, the largest number of people executed on the same day since an unofficial moratorium on capital punishment was lifted in December.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lifted a de facto moratorium on capital punishment on December 17, a day after Pakistani Taliban gunmen attacked a school and killed 132 students and nine teachers.

The slaughter put pressure on the government to do more to tackle the Islamist insurgency.

Twenty-seven people have been hanged since then, most of them militants, but last week it emerged that officials had quietly widened the policy to include all prisoners on death row whose appeals had been rejected.

‘They were not only terrorists, they included the other crimes, some of them were murderers and some did other heinous crimes,’ the ministry spokesman said of the 12 executed at various jails, reports The Straits Times.

BDST: 1211 HRS, MAR 17, 2015