Source: Reuters

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Pakistan has stayed the execution of an Indian accused of spying for a month, India’s foreign minister said on Wednesday, after appeals for clemency to President Pervez Musharraf.

Musharraf had this month rejected the mercy plea by Sarabjit Singh, who was to hang on April 1.

Singh was sentenced to death in 1991 for spying and carrying out four bomb blasts that killed 14 people, but his family said he was innocent and had crossed the border into Pakistan accidentally in 1990 while he was drunk.

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had intervened in the matter.

“President of Pakistan has stayed the execution till 30 April, a postponement by one month,” India’s foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee said in a statement to parliament.

An official in Kot Lakhpat Jail in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, where Singh is being held, confirmed the delay in his execution.

“We have received orders from the President’s House whereby the punishment has been deferred for a month,” deputy superintendent Bashir Ahmed told Reuters.

Pakistani officials said Singh was arrested while trying to slip back into India after the bomb blasts.

Separately, a Pakistani, Jamal Qureshi, who was arrested in India a few years on charges of possessing fake currency, returned to Pakistan through the Wagah border crossing near Lahore after his acquittal by an Indian court, a Pakistani official said.

Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have fought three wars since the partition of British-ruled India in 1947, but they began a peace process in 2004.

Despite better relations, the neighbours remain deeply suspicious of each other.

This month, Pakistan freed an Indian man who spent 35 years on death row in a Pakistani jail on spying charges.

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Tags: Bomb blast, Clemency, Execution, indian, Mercy Plea, Musharraf, Prisoner, Sarabjit Singh