He was released after Pakistan’s Caretaker Human Rights Minister Ansar Burney pressured President Pervez Musharraf to pardon him. Looking tired, but relieved, Sing was whisked away from waiting media to spend his first night in freedom in a five star hotel. Burney was to accompany Kashmir Singh to the border with India and be re-united with his wife Paramjit Kaur on Tuesday, March 4.
Singh, who is about 60-years old. told Minister Burney that he had a love marriage rather than an arranged marriage. His wife confirmed this to the minister when he called her. "Why else would I have waited 35 years for him?" she reportedly asked.
Local media reports say that she has been waiting at the border since she first heard news that her husband would be pardoned. Burney said last week that Singh was held in a condemned prisoners cell for most of the time since his conviction and had become mentally ill.
LOST IN PRISON
He said that he was first informed about Kashmir Singh several years ago by members of the Indian community in London. But he was unable to locate Singh, despite visiting over 20 prisons across the country in relation to his campaign for prison reforms and prisoners’ rights.
The minister said that Singh had not received a single visitor or seen the open sky and like other condemned prisoners, was locked in an overcrowded death cell for more than 23 hours a day in conditions which the minister described as "hell on earth."
Burney said he will travel to India on Tuesday to see Singh re-unite with his wife as well as their two sons and a daughter. "My real purpose in going with him to India is that when this pair of swans meet after 35 years, I want to capture it with my own eyes," he said.
Pakistan and India, which have fought three wars in the 60 years since they received independence from Britain, frequently arrest each other’s citizens, including many fishermen and others who say they strayed across the border inadvertently, according to experts.
FALSELY ACCUSSED
Many are allegedly accused of spying and held for years, usually with no contact with their families, although Singh’s case appears extreme, observers said. Christian prisoners have also been faced with solitary confinement and other abuses, according to several human rights groups, often on charges of blasphemy against Ialsm.
A former policeman from Hoshiarpur town in the Indian state of Punjab, Sing apparently became a trader in electronic goods. He was arrested during a business trip to the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in 1973, on charges of spying. He was convicted and sentenced to death by a military court in Lahore, but Burney said the government stayed his execution in the late 1970s and that Singh’s case then languished. He said some of the paperwork on Singh was missing.
Initially, Singh had been in touch with his family through letters. That that contact broke down 24 years ago after he was shifted repeatedly between prisons, Burney said. The Associated Press news agency quoted him as saying that Singh’s "only communication with his family over this time was a single letter that he received from them many years ago."
The man, who had not seen a sky or sun light for decades urged reporters to tell his family he had was alive. "Tell my family I am joining them tomorrow morning. I am not dead, I got a new life," he said. His release also was also seen as a welcome distraction from news of several suicide bombings in recent days, in which dozens of people died. There is concern about a rise in Islamic extremism in Pakistan, which is still awaiting a new government following recent elections. Pakistan’s Christian minority hopes to have a say in the cabinet. (BosNewsLife’s NEWS WATCH covers news developments impacting the Church and/or compassionate professionals).
