Islamabad/New Delhi - Pakistan's Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the death sentence of an Indian national convicted of spying and carrying out bomb attacks, an official said. Court spokesman Shahid Hussain said a three-member bench dismissed Sarbajit Singh's appeal to review the sentence after his attorney failed to appear in court.
Singh was arrested in 1990 on the Pakistan-India border and charged with carrying out four bombings that killed 14 people in Lahore and Faisalabad in Pakistan's eastern province of Punjab. An anti-terrorism court sentenced him to death in 1999.
Singh, identified by Pakistani authorities as an Indian intelligence agent, denied the allegations and said he was just a farmer who mistakenly crossed the border while drunk.
Soon after the decision, Singh's distraught family appealed to the Indian government to intervene to save his life.
"The whole family is in shock," Singh's daughter Poonam told reporters in the border town of Bhikiwind, 275 kilometres from Chandigarh, capital of the Indian Punjab state.
She said the lawyer representing her father recently told the family that he had become a government lawyer and could no longer handle the case, but a second lawyer also did not show up and was not answering their phone calls.
"The Indian government must intervene to save my father," Poonam pleaded.
"I would like to request both the governments to please come to an agreement and release my husband who is innocent and has suffered a lot," Singh's wife Sukhpreet Kaur said.
Abdul Hameed Rana, the Pakistani lawyer who failed to appear in court, said he would still represent Singh, and added that the Wednesday ruling was not the final word in the case.
"I am a government employee - working as deputy attorney general in Punjab province - but now my appointment has been de-notified on my request and I am free to defend my client," Rana told the German Press Agency
