Mirza update: Living under fear for safety

The physical conditions were almost as grim. Mr Hussain shared a 12ft (3.65m) by 8ft cell with two or three other prisoners. Each cell had two high windows, barred and glassless, so it was freezing in winter and baking in summer. The inmates slept on blankets on the concrete floor, and sometimes at night mice or rats would come up from the cell's hole-in-the ground latrine and run over them.

There were a few redeeming factors. The cells had caged forecourts looking out on walled gardens. The food was edible. Prisoners could receive food parcels, books and magazines, and have radios and televisions. They were allowed two hours' exercise a day, four visitors a week and to send and receive four letters every fifteen days. Mr Hussain spent five years of his imprisonment in a Lahore prison pursuing a BA in political science.

But his ordeal was made worse by a tortuous legal process that amounted to a cruel and unusual punishment in itself. In 1989 he had been sentenced to death. In 1992 the High Court ordered a retrial. In 1994 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1996 the High Court acquitted him, only to refer his case one month later to the Federal Sharia Court, which has jurisdiction over cases of highway robbery. In 1998 a split Sharia court sentenced him to death for a second time and, in 2003, the Supreme Sharia Court rejected his appeal. From last May until Mr Hussain's release this month, General Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan, issued no fewer than four stays of execution.

A rollercoaster? "It was worse than that," replied Mr Hussain, who recalled how his euphoria when the High Court acquitted him in 1996 turned to despair when it referred him to the Sharia court. When that court sentenced him to death for a second time, "I was shattered," he said. "I couldn't believe it. It just broke me down. I thought I would never get out of this evil web."

Another low point was the death of his father, aged 82, in 2003. He had spent months in Pakistan each year, seeking to help his son. Mr Hussain has no doubt that his father's death was hastened by grief. Indeed, his father felt betrayed by his native country and insisted that he was not to be buried in Pakistan. "It was one of the saddest moments of my life," Mr Hussain said. "I wasn't close to him when he needed me most."

As Mr Hussain's predicament worsened, so he turned to Islam. It was what many prisoners did when they realised that no lawyers or courts would save them, he said. He gave up reading novels such as Gone With the Wind and the James Herriot books. He began rising at 4am to study the Koran and other religious works. He dedicated his life to Allah. He survived, he said, "because I kept praying and kept close to religion".

There were moments of hopelessness when he would lie awake at night and imagine his own execution. "The Devil starts playing tricks with you," he said. "Evil thoughts start rushing into your mind. Where is Allah? Why is he letting this happen? What's the benefit of believing in one God? It's the Devil trying to lead you astray."

Towards the end, as he was being kept alive only by successive stays of execution, Mr Hussain began almost to long for the peace that death would bring. He told his relatives to stop campaigning for him. They refused. "They advised me not to lose hope and be patient," he recalled. "They said they would fight to the end."

That fight was led by Mr Hussain's elder brother, Amjad. In 2004, after the death of their father and the failure of Hussain's final appeal, he gave up his £30,000-a-year job as an analytical scientist with a pharmaceutical company in Leeds to campaign full-time for his brother.

Initially he sought to persuade the family of the taxi driver whom Mr Hussain was alleged to have murdered on a solo holiday in Pakistan to accept "blood money" in return for his release, as permitted under Sharia. He enlisted Muslim scholars and tribal leaders as intermediaries. He gradually increased the £10,000 his father had offered in 1989 to £100,000, a huge sum by Pakistani standards, that he would have raised by mortgaging the family home in Leeds (as it is, Amjad has run up debts of about £80,000). The driver's family were bent on revenge and refused.

When that approach failed and Mr Hussain's final appeal for clemency was rejected last spring, Amjad changed tack. He sought help from his local MPs, Greg Mulholland and Hilary Benn, and from Sajjad Haider Karim, an MEP. Pressure groups such as Fair Trials Abroad, Amnesty International and the Islamic Human Rights Commission joined the cause. Newspapers picked up the story and the campaign snowballed.

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, and other Cabinet ministers pursued the case with their Pakistani counterparts. Josep Borrell, President of the European Parliament, José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, and Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, made representations to Pakistan's Government. In May, as Western pressure mounted, President Musharraf issued his first stay of execution, but it was a fortunate confluence of events that clinched Mr Hussain's release.

Last month, General Musharraf visited Brussels and Britain to promote his new autobiography, and he was dogged by the issue at every stop. This month Tony Blair and the Prince of Wales, who is Colonel-in-Chief of Mr Hussain's old Territorial Army regiment, made separate visits to Pakistan and both men raised the case directly with the President.

On Thursday, November 16, after issuing four successive stays, General Musharraf finally commuted the death sentence. As Mr Hussain had already served 18 years, that meant he would be freed immediately. Amjad observed: "It would have been terribly expensive for Pakistan to have gone ahead with the execution".

Mr Hussain was by that time in a cell by himself - punishment for giving unauthorised interviews from death row to The Times and other news outlets. He heard the news at 8am from a prisoner deputed to clean his cell. "Because it was such relieving and unbelievable news I kept thinking that until someone from the jail management comes and tells me, I should not be very excited," he said.

Late that night he was taken from his cell and driven in a police convoy to a jail in Faisalabad, 150 miles away. He was not told why. It was not until early the next morning, when he was put through formalities such as giving his thumbprints and parents' names that he knew for certain he was being freed. "I thought, 'Oh God. It's all over. I'm being taken home'."

He was given civilian clothes and driven to the British High Commission in Islamabad. Helen Feather, a diplomat who had befriended him in prison, rushed out in tears to greet him. He was given a bath and a medical check.

He reluctantly agreed to have his beard trimmed, but not shaved off, apparently because General Musharraf did not want him released looking like a Taleban. "I thought I was daydreaming. I could not believe it was real," he said. He was issued with an emergency passport and driven to the airport with Ms Feather. They flew business-class to Paris and then on to London, arriving late in the evening. They were the first off the plane and there at the end of the walkway was Amjad.

"We just hugged each other," Amjad said. "It was just euphoria and raw emotion."

-The Times

(Eventually, he says, he might even return to Pakistan and visit his old cellmates in Rawalpindi Central Jail. This time, though, he will not go alone.)

© Copyright 2003 by The New Nation

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