Basit, who uses a wheelchair, has been paralyzed since contracting tubercular meningitis in 2010 while in the central jail in Faisalabad, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
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A prison source said told The Telegraph: “It was not possible to kept the paralysed Abdul Basit standing on the whiteboard of the gallows during execution”.
He was to be executed on July 29 but it was temporarily halted by Lahore High Court after a petition was lodged to set aside the death penalty due to his bad health.
Pakistan’s law allows for the granting of to prisoners a suffering from severe “ill-health”.
“Basit’s hanging would be a grotesque spectacle and cruel injustice”, Maya Foa, director of the death penalty team at the human rights group Reprieve, said earlier.
Since December, 236 people have been hanged in Pakistan despite strong opposition from rights groups and the worldwide community. Basit is convicted of murder, though he denies the charges.
Since repealing the ban, the country has executed more than 200 people.
Basit, 43, was convicted six years ago of murdering the uncle of a woman he was having a relationship with.
The planned hanging of a paraplegic prisoner in Pakistan has been delayed.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s military in a statement Monday that military courts had handed down death sentences to nine “hard core terrorists” who had killed civilians and security officials.
His sister, Shugufta Sultana, said they were “terrified and nervous”.
This grotesque conundrum is not incidental to a system of judicial execution.
It is on course to have one of the highest rates of executions in the world.
Malik said the matter would now be referred to senior government officials in Punjab province. “The government should place an official moratorium on capital punishment until the practice is abolished”.
The court rejected that plea, and ordered jail authorities to go ahead with the execution, inviting criticism from local and global groups.
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Amnesty global estimates that around 8,000 prisoners are now on death row in the Islamic country.
