Pakistan officials dismiss report about sending Sarabjit abroad

Lahore/Islamabad: Pakistan on Monday said that the “best possible care” is being given to Indian death row convict Sarabjit Singh - comatose in a Lahore hospital after a brutal assault - and that there are no plans to move him. They dismissed a report that a medical board was considering a proposal to send Sarabjit abroad. Sarabjit, 49, is being provided the best possible care in a Lahore hospital, and there are no plans to move him, Information Minister Arif Nizami said. Nizami, a key member of the caretaker government, told PTI that Sarabjit “would continue” to be treated at Jinnah hospital in Lahore and there are no plans to move him. “The best possible care is being provided to Sarabjit”, he said on the sidelines of an official event in Islamabad. The caretaker government has also taken steps to provide consular access to Sarabjit for Indian officials, he said. Meanwhile, officials said the four-member medical board headed by Jinnah Hospital chief executive Mahmood Shaukat conducted a routine examination of Sarabjit this morning, officials said. They rejected a media report that the board was mulling a proposal to send Sarabjit abroad for treatment. “No such proposal has been under consideration,” an official of the health department of Punjab province told PTI. “In fact, the medical board has no mandate (to decide about sending Sarabjit abroad),” said the official, who did not want to be named as he was not authorised to speak to the media. The medical board is “minutely monitoring the patient” and Sarabjit is being given the “best treatment” at Jinnah Hospital, the official said. Sources in the hospital told PTI that there had been “no improvement whatsoever” in Sarabjit’s condition. The members of the medical board – Shaukat, Postgraduate Medical Institute principal Anjum Habib Vohra, Jinnah Hospital neuro department head Zafar Chaudhry and King Edward Medical University neuro-physician Naeem Kasuri – see Sarabjit’s case as “major neurosurgical challenge”, the sources said. Sarabjit sustained several injuries, including a skull fracture, when six prisoners attacked him in Kot Lakhpat Jail on Friday and doctors said his chances of survival are slim. He was hit on the head with bricks and cut with sharp weapons. He is in a deep coma and on ventilator support in an intensive care unit of Jinnah Hospital. He was convicted of alleged involvement in a string of bomb attacks in Punjab province that killed 14 people in 1990. His mercy petitions were rejected by the courts and former President Pervez Musharraf. The outgoing Pakistan People’s Party-led government put off Sarabjit’s execution for an indefinite period in 2008. Sarabjit’s family says he is the victim of mistaken identity and had inadvertently strayed across the border in an inebriated state. PTI