Man in jail for 35 years 'found'

India's missing POWs

Pakistan's Human Rights Minister, Ansar Burney, says that he has traced an Indian who has been held in prison in Pakistan for 35 years.

Mr Burney said that Kashmir Singh was arrested in 1973 on espionage charges, the official APP news agency reports.

He said Mr Singh was sentenced to death in Pakistan under the Official Secrets Act by a court martial in Lahore.

But the Indian embassy in Pakistan says that Kashmir Singh is not among 55 PoWs officially listed as missing.

An embassy official told the BBC that they had received no word about him from the Pakistani authorities either before or after the minister's statement.

He said the embassy cannot verify the identity of the prisoner without consular access to him. The official said that the names of prisoners can sometimes be changed.

Hundreds of servicemen and civilians were imprisoned by India and Pakistan during hostilities between the two sides in 1965 and 1971.

Death cells

Mr Burney said Mr Singh has been in a condemned prisoners cell ever since his conviction and has become mentally ill.

The minister was already known as a prominent Pakistani human rights campaigner before becoming human rights minister.

He says he was first informed about Kashmir Singh several years ago by members of the Indian community in London, APP reports.

But he was unable to locate Mr Singh, despite visiting over 20 prisons across the country in relation to his campaign for prison reforms and prisoners' rights.

APP said that Mr Singh was finally discovered in the death cells during a visit by Mr Burney to the central jail in Lahore.

The minister said that Mr Singh had not received a single visitor or seen the open sky and, like other condemned prisoners, was locked in an overcrowded death cell for more than 23 hours a day in conditions which the minister described as "hell on Earth."

At the time of his arrest, Mr Singh was reportedly a husband and a father of three young children.

Mr Burney urged anyone with information on the whereabouts of Kashmir Singh's family in India to contact the Ministry of Human Rights in Pakistan or the Ansar Burney Trust.