Source: AFP

LAHORE, Pakistan (AFP) — Pakistan late Monday released an Indian man who spent 35 years languishing on death row on espionage charges, jail officials said.

“Kashmir Singh has been released. He was received by Human Rights Minister Ansar Burney,” Bashir Ahmed, deputy superintendent of Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore, told AFP.

Singh, 61, who now sports a short grey beard smiled and waved to reporters before getting into a car, witnesses said.

He is scheduled to leave for India on Tuesday to be reunited with his family, officials said.

Singh was arrested in the garrison city of Rawalpindi in 1973 at the age of 26 and sentenced to death by a military court. He spent the past three-and-a-half decades in jail without ever receiving a visitor, Burney said last month after discovering Singh.

His release came after President Pervez Musharraf pardoned him.

Burney had requested the presidential pardon following reports that Singh, held under the Official Secrets Act, had become “mentally disabled” during his long stint behind bars.

Burney last month said that he had discovered Singh, father of three, in the central jail in Lahore after he was tipped off about the detainee by the Indian community in London and searched various prisons.

A mercy petition was accepted by President Musharraf, said Burney, who also heads his private welfare trust.

The president expressed “shock and disbelief” when informed about Singh and accepted his mercy petition and issued orders for his release and repatriation, the minister said last week.

He said he had located Singh’s family in India.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan and India have fought three wars since their independence in 1947 but launched a slow-moving peace process in 2004.

They have recently held a series of prisoner exchanges, mainly of fishermen who strayed into each others’ territorial waters and were detained.

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Tags: , human rights, indian, Kashmir Singh, Prison