LAHORE // Pakistan has postponed the execution of a paraplegic death row convict following appeals by human rights groups, officials said on Tuesday.
Abdul Basit, 43, who was convicted of murder in 2009, contracted tubercular meningitis in 2010 while in prison which left him paralysed from the waist down.
Basit was due to be hanged on Tuesday, but a court delayed the execution after Justice Project Pakistan, the human rights law firm handling his case, raised concerns about how the wheelchair-bound man would mount the scaffold.
“The hanging has been postponed. A magistrate in the morning ordered the postponement because Abdul Basit is a disabled man,” Usman, an official at Faisalabad jail where Basit is being held and who goes by one name, said.
According to the law firm, prison guidelines require that a prisoner stands on the gallows and the rope’s length is determined by his standing height.
They said last week that attempting to hang a wheelchair-bound convict may not work.
Another jail official, who requested anonymity, said: “The rules are silent on the hanging of a disabled person. It doesn’t explain how to execute a prisoner who can’t stand on his legs.
“The hanging has been delayed for the time-being and a new date would be fixed after taking advice from the senior officials.”
Basit’s mother Nusrat Perveen also confirmed the execution delay, saying that a jail official had called her to inform her “the hanging has been postponed because of Basit’s sickness”.
“Why do they want his execution? He is already severely sick, what will they get from his hanging?” she added.
Basit’s case is the latest to highlight Pakistan’s decision last December to lift a six-year moratorium on executions, after Taliban militants massacred more than 150 people — mostly children — at a school.
Since that time it has executed more than 200 people.
Amnesty International estimates that Pakistan has more than 8,000 prisoners on death row, most of whom have exhausted the appeals process.
* Agence France-Presse
