ISLAMABAD, March 9: The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the death sentence awarded to Indian spy Manjeet Singh alias Sarabjeet Singh for his involvement in the 1990 bomb blast in Lahore.
A two-member bench comprising Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar and Justice Shakirullah Jan dismissed a review petition against the conviction on technical grounds and said that the issues raised by the petitioner should had been argued at the time of appeal.
“This is the first review petition of a total of four similar petitions pending in the apex court,” Abdul Hamid Rana, the counsel for Sarabjeet Singh, told Dawn after the hearing.
On Sept 27, 2005, the apex court had dismissed a petition for leave to appeal against the sentence awarded in the Yakki Gate terrorism case as the appeal was time barred for 620 days.
A different bench had earlier upheld the death sentence for Singh in three cases by dismissing appeals against the Lahore High Court order for his involvement in multiple bomb blasts in three Pakistani cities.
On Thursday, Mr Rana cited case laws to substantiate a claim that the apex court had earlier condoned a delay of 680 days and pointed out that filing of appeals from jail had been delayed because Singh, being an Indian citizen, lacked resources to do so.
Singh, resident of Bhikiwand in Amritsar, was arrested by the Mujahid Force on August 30, 1990, near the Kasur border in the territory of Pakistan and was handed over to the Intelligence Battalion, Lahore for interrogation.
Later the spy told interrogators that he was trained by Indian Military Intelligence (IMI) and RAW (Research and Analysis Wing), to conduct multiple bomb blasts in Lahore, Kasur and Faisalabad in which 14 persons were killed, including women and children, and 89 were wounded.
In the Yakki Gate case, the spy was accused of planting an explosive device near a fruit shop belonging to Mohammad Hanif that resulted in the death of three persons.
An anti-terrorist court in Lahore had awarded him the death penalty in October 3, 1991, under Sections 302 (punishment of Qatl Amad) and 34 (acts done in furtherance of common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and Section 3/4 of the Explosives Act.
Singh still has a chance to file a clemency plea before President Pervez Musharraf under Article 45 (president’s power to grant pardon) of the Constitution even if all the review petitions are dismissed, his lawyer said.
In its detailed judgment of upholding the death sentence, the apex court had held that the conviction awarded to the Indian spy was well deserved and did not warrant any leniency.
