ISLAMABAD: Having pardoned Kashmir Singh, Pakistan president has rejected the mercy petition of another Indian prisoner, Sarbajit Singh alias Manjit Singh, who was arrested in 1990 on terrorism charges.
Ansar Burney, Pakistani minister for human rights who had played a lead role in Kashmir Singh’s release, confirmed the rejection of Sarbajit Singh’s petition, saying there was great difference between the nature of the charges against Kashmir and Sarabjit.
The minister said Sarabjit had confessed having been paid Rs36,000 by the Indian intelligence outfit to conduct multiple bomb blasts in Pakistan that killed 15 persons and injuring 90. The conviction was upheld by the Lahore High Court in 2003, prompting him to make an appeal to the supreme court of Pakistan claiming that he was not Manjit who had been brought up in Agra and whose family later moved to Amritsar in 1972. He claimed he was Sarabjit of Amritsar and it was the prosecution that had forced him to admit to a wrong identity.
Interestingly, it is not terrorism but smuggling of desi liquor that had brought upon Sarabjit this doom.
The 42-year-old believes his death sentence to be his divine punishment for having violated the teachings of Guru Nanak. “I am a family person who did commit the crimes of drinking and smuggling of liquor from across the border (from where he was caught in 1990) but terrorism is not what I could ever think of doing,” his Pakistani lawyer Abdul Hameed Rana quotes Singh of having told him. Sarabjit was detained in the death cell of the Kot Lakhpat Jail Lahore, along with Kashmir Singh.
