By Muhammad Najeeb, IANS
Islamabad : An Indian national languishing in a Pakistani jail for 35 years has been shifted to a hospital after he was spotted by a minister, an official here said Tuesday.
During a routine visit to the Lahore jail, Federal Minister for Human Rights Ansar Burney found Kashmir Singh, son of Sansar Singh, who was arrested in 1973 on espionage charges in Pakistan and sentenced to death under the Official Secret Act 1923 by the Court of Field General Court Martial.
When contacted, an official in the Indian High Commission said they had come to know about Kashmir Singh through media reports and someone would be visiting him soon to ascertain his identity.
“Right now I cannot confirm whether he is an Indian national or not,” the official told IANS.
Thirty-five years after he was incarcerated, Kashmir Singh is now weak, old and mentally disturbed. He has not received a single visitor in all these decades or even seen the open sky.
He, like other condemned prisoners, has been locked in an overcrowded death cell for 23.5 hours a day, only allowed out for 30 minutes to stretch his legs.
According to the records available with the interior ministry, Kashmir Singh, who is from the Indian Punjab, had three young children – two boys and a girl – at the time of his arrest. He has not seen any of them ever since.
A petition was immediately made on behalf of the government’s human rights division to President Pervez Musharraf for his early release.
Burney, who described Kashmir Singh’s life as “hell on earth”, has requested that anyone with information regarding the case immediately contact the ministry of human rights in Pakistan or the Ansar Burney Trust – a human rights trust run by the minister.
It all began when Burney, who is a lawyer, saw Kashmir Singh in the jail and inquired about him. The minister visited over 20 prisons all across the country in relation to his prison reforms and prisoners’ rights work, and to search for a number of prisoners who he and his organisation had been trying to locate for many years.