The mother of a paraplegic inmate on death row in Pakistan has urged the country’s president to pardon her son.
Nusrat Perveen said that president Mamnoon Hussain had ordered authorities to halt the execution of her son Abdul Basit in January, hours before he was to be hanged; that stay of execution order has now expired.
After meeting Basit at a prison in the city of Faisalabad, Perveen said that her son had lost a lot of weight and looked skeletal.
“I wept and cried on seeing him in fragile health,” she said. “My son is like a dead man already, do they want to hang a dead man?”
Basit, 43, has been paralysed from the waist down since contracting meningitis in prison in 2010 and uses a wheelchair.
He has been on death row since 2009, convicted of murdering a man in a financial dispute.
Jail officials said they were initiating a new process to obtain a death warrant to execute Basit.
Pakistan’s supreme court last year said Basit’s execution must comply with the country’s prison rules governing execution procedures. However those rules contain no provisions for the hanging of prisoners in wheelchairs.
Maya Foa, a director at the anti-death penalty NGO Reprieve, expressed concern that Pakistani authorities were gearing up to try and execute Basit.
Foa said in a statement that the government has still given no explanation of how it plans to avoid a “horribly botched execution.”
She said the international community must urgently call on Hussain to halt “this cruel spectacle.”
Campaigners have argued that hanging a man in a wheelchair runs a high risk of the execution going wrong, potentially leading to slow strangulation or decapitation.
Basit was given a stay of execution in September 2015 because officials were uncertain of how to hang a man incapable of standing up unsupported.
Plans to execute him were again postponed in November 2015.
Associated Press contributed to this report
