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Pakistan’s top diplomat in New Delhi yesterday visited a Pakistani prisoner who was critically injured in an attack by an inmate in an Indian jail, officials said.
Convicted murderer Sanaullah Ranjay suffered multiple head injuries in a prison in India’s northern city of Jammu in an apparent tit-for-tat attack after an Indian prisoner, Sarabjit Singh, was fatally assaulted in Pakistan.
Last week, Ranjay was airlifted to a government hospital in the city of Chandigarh, 250 km north of New Delhi.
“The Pakistani High Commissioner, Salman Bashir is visiting the hospital where Ranjay is being treated. He wanted to get a medical update,” the press officer at the Pakistan High Commission, Manzoor Ali Memon, said.
Memon said the embassy is also making travel arrangements for Ranjay’s family in Pakistan to cross the border and visit him in the hospital.
A spokeswoman for the government hospital said Ranjay was in the intensive care unit and on a ventilator as his condition “continues to remain critical”.
“Sanaullah comes from an extremely poor family of Sialkot. They have neither ID cards nor passports. The Foreign Office has been in touch with them and have informed them that we would facilitate some members of the family to travel to Chandigarh to meet Sanaullah,” a spokesman said.
“The Ministry of Interior will be assisting them in making ID cards and passports,” Foreign Secretary Jalil Abbas Jilani said.
The spokesman at the Foreign Office added that Sana’s wife is dead while his two teenaged sons do not have ID cards. “Sana’s brother-in-law and a cousin will be getting their travel documents, ready to go to Chandigarh,” the spokesman added.
Ranjay, who hails from the city of Sialkot in Pakistan, was attacked by a prisoner who was identified as a former Indian army soldier nearly 24 hours after Singh’s death in Lahore.
Singh died last week in Pakistan and was cremated with state honours in his native village in northwestern India where hundreds of protesters shouted “Down with Pakistan!” as they gathered to pay their tributes.
The prison violence could aggravate tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, whose relations were hit by a border flare-up earlier this year.
According to the Indian government, 535 Indian prisoners, including 483 fishermen, are in Pakistani jails, while 272 Pakistani prisoners are behind bars in India.