Pakistani doctors treating a comatose Sarabjit Singh here said on Sunday there has been no improvement in his condition and chances of survival are “slim” even as his distraught family visited him and demanded that he be sent to India for better treatment.
More than 45 hours after death row convict Sarabjit was admitted to Jinnah Hospital with a severe head injury, there has been “no sign” of recovery or improvement in his condition, the doctors were quoted as saying by sources. The doctors believe the 49-year-old’s chances of survival are “slim” as he sustained injuries over a widespread area of his head that led to unconsciousness.
Sarabjit’s sister Dalbir Kaur, wife Sukhpreet Kaur and daughters Swapandeep and Poonam, visited him at the hospital after arriving here on Sunday from India.
A senior doctor of the state-run Jinnah Hospital said that Sarabjit’s sister, wife and two daughters were allowed to see him through a window from outside the intensive care unit as it was “not good for the patient as well as attendants to get close to each other”.
“Sarabjit Singh’s face is swollen, he was beaten with iron rods... He is unconscious, in a very critical condition...” his sister Dalbir Kaur said. Sarabjit’s wife Sukhpreet has appealed to Pakistani authorities to send her husband back to India for better treatment.
Sources said his skull was fractured after being hit on the head with bricks and his face and torso cut with weapons fashioned from spoons and pieces of ghee tins during the assault on Friday by six prisoners in his barrack at Kot Lakhpat Jail.
Sarabjit has been sentenced to death for a series of bombings in Pakistan’s Punjab province in 1990 that left 14 dead.
His mercy petitions were rejected by the courts and former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf. The outgoing government had indefinitely deferred his execution in 2008.
His family, though, has been saying he was a victim of mistaken identity and that he had inadvertently strayed into Pakistan in a drunken state.
Sarabjit’s family members, who were provided a 15-day gratis visa by Pakistan, crossed over into Pakistan at the Attari-Wagah check post after praying at the Golden Temple in Amritsar for his long life. They carried with them bottles of holy water from the temple’s sarovar.
Sarabjit’s sister Dalbir Kaur blamed the Pakistani jail authorities for conniving in the attack on him and refused to believe claims that the other inmates of the jail had snatched the keys to his cell from the warder. “Pakistan should take immediate action against the perpetrators of the attack,” she said. “I think the warder himself gave the keys and they made most of that opportunity. Why his barrack was changed at a time when other Pakistani prisoners were having food?” she questioned.