Plans to execute a a disabled man at dawn on Wednesday morning have been stayed with hours to go by the government of Pakistan, according to his lawyers.
The execution of Abdul Basit, a paraplegic man, has previously been postponed several times after rights groups raised concerns about how a man in a wheelchair would mount the scaffold.
The latest delay, news of which emerged on Tuesday, was reported by lawyers at the Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), a non-profit human rights law firm which welcomed what it described as a “last-minute decision”. The government is understood to have postponed Basit’s execution for two months, according to the campaigning human rights charity, Reprieve.
Convicted of murder in 2009, Basit’s legs were paralysed after he contracted meningitis in prison.
Maya Foa, director of the death penalty team at Reprieve said: “This welcome move comes with only hours before a paralysed man was set to face a horrific execution. It has to be hoped that the Pakistan government will now reconsider its rush to the gallows, which has seen an estimated 300 people hanged since December.”
Sarah Belal, Basit’s lawyer and the director of JPP, said: “The government should be commended for recognising that to go ahead with it would have been needlessly cruel.
“Basit has already suffered terribly due to medical neglect while in prison. To hang him would neither serve justice nor make Pakistan any safer.”
Stay of execution for Abdul Basit! Pakistan takes a huge step to stand for Human Rights!
— Sarah Belal (@SarahBelal_) November 24, 2015
Pakistan’s human rights commission said earlier this week that it had written to the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, seeking to delay the execution and that prison authorities were awaiting an answer from the government on how to proceed with the hanging.
A series of executions have been carried out in Pakistan since the government scrapped an unofficial moratorium on the death penalty following the Taliban massacre of more than 130 pupils at a military school in Peshawar in December last year.
Controversy surrounds many of the cases, including that of Shafqat Hussain, who was hanged in August despite claims he was a juvenile at the time he was said to have murdered a child.