NEW DELHI, Oct 5: The wife of a Kashmiri Muslim militant sentenced to death for plotting a 2001 attack on the Indian parliament met President Abdul Kalam on Thursday in a bid to save her husband.

“I gave a petition to President Kalam and he said he will examine the case in full,” Tabasum Guru, wife of Mohammed Afzal Guru, told reporters outside the presidential palace in New Delhi after a 20-minute meeting with Kalam.

“We can now only pray,” she said, standing alongside her seven-year-old son, Ghalib.

Guru, who is held in New Delhi’s maximum-security Tihar prison, was found guilty last month of plotting the December 2001 attack that left 14 people dead, including the five attackers, and brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.

The death sentence — scheduled for October 20, a major Muslim festival marking the end of the fasting month of Ramazan — has sparked protests in insurgency-racked Indian Kashmir in the past week.

“One of the points she raised during her talks was that Afzal had not been given a fair trial even by the Supreme Court,” a presidential aide told AFP.

Relatives of police and parliament staff killed in the attack urged Kalam to ignore Guru’s clemency plea.—AFP