Briton tells tales of Pak jail horrors

LONDON: A Briton who spent 18 years facing the death sentence in Pakistan for a murder he says he did not commit told on Monday of the horror of hearing the sounds of fellow prisoners being executed just metres away.

 

Mirza Tahir Hussain was freed from jail earlier this month after President Pervez Musharraf commuted his death sentence to a life term. He returned to Britain on Nov. 18, at the age of 36, having spent almost 18 years behind bars.

 

In one of his first interviews since arriving back in Britain, Hussain described how he spent his years in a small cell with as many as eight other death row prisoners. He said inmates were taken from the cell straight to the gallows, about three metres away, at one day’s notice. “They just snatch them away from our hands,” he told BBC. “We can hear the guards and all the officials gathering for this purpose and when the inmate is made to stand on the trap door and when the trap door opens and when he’s hanged, we could hear all that.”

 

Hussain, a British Muslim of Pakistani descent, was originally acquitted of the killing by Pakistan’s High Court but an Islamic court sentenced him to death in 1998. The sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003. Hussain insisted he was acting in self defence when the taxi driver Jamshed Khan was shot. He said Khan ordered him at gunpoint to hand over his wallet and threatened him.