Mother seeks pardon for son

The mother of a paralysed inmate has urged the Pakistani president to pardon her son.

I wept and cried on seeing him in fragile health. My son is like a dead man already, do they want to hang a dead man?

Nusrat Perveen, mother of the death-row convict

ISLAMABAD — The mother of a paraplegic inmate on death row has urged the president of Pakistan 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 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.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan 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.