Mother seeks pardon for paralysed son on death row

The mother of a paraplegic inmate on death row on Monday urged the country's president to pardon her son. Nusrat Perveen said that President Mamnoon Hussain had ordered authorities to halt the execution of her son Abdul Basit in January, hours before he was to be hanged; that stay of execution order has now expired. After meeting Basit at a prison in the city of Faisalabad, Perveen told The Associated Press that her son had lost a lot of weight and looked skeletal. "I wept and cried on seeing him in fragile health," she said. "My son is like a dead man already, do they want to hang a dead man?"
Basit, 43, has been paralysed from the waist down since contracting meningitis in prison in 2010 and uses a wheelchair. He has been on death row since 2009, convicted of murdering a man in a financial dispute. Jail officials said they were initiating a new process to obtain a death warrant to execute Basit.