Sarabjit Singh critical after Lahore jail attack

Agencies/New Delhi

Official sources added that the Indian High Commission has contacted the Pakistani foreign ministry for ascertaining facts and was awaiting a response.

Two officials were sent to Lahore for consular access, sources in the external affairs ministry said.

Singh was hospitalised with a serious head injury after two fellow prisoners attacked him at the  Kot Lakhpat Jail, , a doctor said.

“Sarabjit was having tea with fellow prisoners Mohamed Muddasar and Amir, also condemned to death in murder cases. They exchanged heated words with Sarabjit and attacked him with bricks and blades,” jail official Munawar Ali said.

Meanwhile Sarabjit’s sister Dalbir Kaur told the NDTV news channel, “I had told everybody he is not safe. This is a conspiracy. The attack was pre-planned.”

After the incident, four officials including the jail warden were suspended.

Singh was arrested in Pakistan in 1991 and sentenced to death for spying and carrying out four bomb blasts that killed 14 people. His family claims he is innocent.

His family says he is the victim of mistaken identity and had inadvertently strayed across the border in a drunken state.

Four years ago, Pakistan’s then-president Pervez Musharraf stayed the execution after appeals for clemency from India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Authorities had tightened Sarabjit’s security after the recent execution in India of Afzal Guru, who was convicted of involvement in the 2001 terror attack on the Parliament.

The Kot Lakhpat jail currently has some 17,000 prisoners though its official capacity is only 4,000. There have been instances in the past of prisoners being killed within the prison.

Indian national Chamel Singh died in the same jail under suspicious circumstances.