ISLAMABAD: A disabled Pakistani murder convict was given a fourth stay of execution just hours before he was due to be hanged, as rights activists slammed Islamabad for a executions spree on track to see 300 deaths in under a year.

Abdul Basit, a paraplegic who was convicted of murder in 2009, was scheduled to be hung early Wednesday. His execution has already been harrowingly postponed several times after rights groups raised concerns about how a wheelchair-bound man would mount the scaffold.

The presidency issued a statement late Tuesday saying the execution had been delayed for two months while President Mamnoon Hussain ordered an inquiry into Basit's medical condition.

The statement said the president had vowed that "human rights will be upheld".

"We are very happy to hear the TV news that (the) president of Pakistan has stayed the execution," Basit's mother Nusrat Parveen told AFP in response to the last minute delay.

"We also got confirmation from a jail staff," she said, adding that the family hoped the stay would be extended beyond two months.

Earlier, Basit's sister Asma Mazhar had issued a plea to the president to spare her brother.

She told AFP she had gone with her mother to see him on Tuesday for what they had believed was the last time, and found him "helpless and quiet".

She said he told them that authorities had come to measure his body and that it was an "awful moment".

Pakistan has executed 299 people since the death penalty was controversially reinstated following a Taliban mass killing at a school in Peshawar last December, according to Amnesty International.

"Pakistan will imminently have executed 300 people since it lifted a moratorium on executions, shamefully sealing its place among the world's worst executioners," it said in a statement.

Forty-five people were executed in October alone, Amnesty said, making it the deadliest month since the moratorium was lifted.