ISLAMABAD/NEW DELHI: Pakistan’s Supreme Court yesterday dismissed Indian prisoner Sarabjit Singh’s review petition that challenged his death sentence. A three-member bench of the apex court, headed by Justice Raja Fayyaz gave the verdict, the News International reported.
The Pakistan Supreme Court on Monday adjourned till yesterday the hearing in Sarabjit’s plea against the death penalty handed to him for his alleged involvement in bomb blasts in this country.
On March 9, 2006, a two-member Supreme Court bench had dismissed Sarabjit’s petition against the sentence for his alleged involvement in carrying out four bomb blasts at Lahore in 1990 that killed 14 people.
Sarabjit, a resident of Amritsar, has been on the death row for the past 18 years ever since his conviction in 1991. His family contests the sentence, saying Sarabjit had strayed into Pakistan in a drunken state and had nothing to do with the blasts. Sarabjit, who is lodged in Kot Lakhpat jail, was to have been hanged April 1, 2008, but the authorities put this off after newly installed Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani sought to examine the issue.
In Bhikiwind, Indian Punjab, his distraught family said that the Indian government must intervene to save Sarabjit’s life. “We are shocked that this has happened. We never expected that his petition would be rejected on technical grounds because his lawyer did not appear,” Sarabjit’s daughter Poonam said in the border town of Bhikiwind, 275 km from the state capital Chandigarh.
She added that the lawyer earlier representing Sarabjit had recently told the family that he had become a government lawyer and could no longer appear for him.
— With input from agencies
