Pakistani authorities called off the execution of a paraplegic man because he was unable to stand on the gallows, his legal team told ucanews.com.
Abdul Basit, 43, who is paralysed from the waist down, was scheduled to hang early on Tuesday in Faisalabad central prison after the Supreme Court dismissed his final appeal a day earlier.
But prison officers had been unable to carry out the sentence after the Supreme Court had specifically stated that the execution must be completed with the full compliance of the law. In Pakistan law, the condemned must be able to walk up to the gallows.
Earlier, Catholic authorities in Pakistan had urged the government to show clemency in Basit's case.
"The government should change his death sentence to life imprisonment if it doesn't want to free him. But hanging a paraplegic inmate will be a cruel decision," Fr Aftab James Paul (pictured above), of the Diocesan Commission for Interreligious Dialogue in Faisalabad, told ucanews.com.
Yasir Shahbaz, spokesman for the law firm Justice Project Pakistan, which is helping Basit, confirmed the hanging was postponed.
"A magistrate at the jail to oversee the execution, had to call it off after Basit was unable to walk up to the gallows," Mr Shahbaz said. The magistrate will now submit a report in the High Court and wait for further instructions, he said.
Basit, a former administrator at a medical college, was sentenced to death in 2010 for fatally shooting a man, a charge he always denied.
Cecil Chaudhry, executive director of Pakistani bishops' National Commission for Justice and Peace, welcomed the postponement of Basit's execution.
"The Church appeals to the president to commute his death sentence to a life prison term on humanitarian grounds," he said.
The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan denounced the execution order as an offense against all norms of civilised justice.
Hanging Basit would raise awkward questions about the Pakistani justice system and indict the Pakistani state and society as brutal entities, it said in a statement this week, urging the president to grant him a reprieve.
Basit was convicted in 2009 for killing the uncle of a woman with whom he was accused of having a relationship. He has consistently denied murdering the man. In 2010, he contracted tubercular meningitis, was in a coma for several weeks and ended up being paralysed from the waist down. His lawyers have argued throughout that his incontinence will add to his loss of dignity during his execution.
In a video appeal on the eve of the scheduled execution, Basit's mother and wife had appealed to the president to grant him a reprieve.
According to rights groups, Pakistan has more than 8,000 death-row prisoners. Pakistan lifted a six-year moratorium on capital punishment in December after a deadly Taliban assault on a school in Peshawar resulted in the deaths of 132 children.
The government initially reinstated executions for terror convicts, but later resumed hanging for all death row inmates. Since December, 236 people have been hanged in Pakistan despite strong opposition from rights groups and the international community.
Additional reporting courtesy of ucanews.com
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