By IANS,
New Delhi : Pakistani officials Sunday urged India to set free an 80-year-old virologist, Khalil Chishty, who is serving life imprisonment in an Ajmer jail with his appeal pending in the Supreme Court.
Sources said the issue of the ailing Pakistani prisoner figured at the luncheon meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari.
The issues, sources said, was raised by Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who was sitting opposite his Indian counterpart P. Chidambaram. Chidamabaram informed his Pakistani counterpart that the issue was before the Supreme Court which has yet to hear the case.
The Pakistani doctor was given a life term Jan 31, 2011 by a trial court for a murder in Ajmer in 1992. The doctor, born in Ajmer to a prosperous family of caretakers of the Khwaja Moinuddin Chishty shrine, was studying in Pakistan at the time of partition in 1947.
He didn’t return to his family in Ajmer till when he came to visit his ailing mother in 1992. Chishty allegedly killed a man after a fight over some dispute.
The case came to light in June 2011 when then Supreme Court judge Markandeya Katju wrote to the prime minister urging that the Pakistani national be pardoned on humanitarian grounds.