Muzaffarabad -
An 11th-hour stay of execution was issued on Wednesday night for a Pakistani man due to be hanged on Thursday for a murder carried out when he was 14.
Lawyers insist Shafqat Hussein, now 25, was forced to confess after days of torture following his arrest in 2004 over the killing of a seven-year-old child.
They claimed that Mr Hussein was burnt with cigarettes and that three of his fingernails were pulled out during questioning.
“For God's sake, don't deprive me of Shafqat, he is my last child. He is innocent,” his mother, Makhani Begum, told Reuters in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, where the family lives.
“Oh, my Allah, save my Shafqat from falling victim to injustice.”
Mr Hussain, who left school unable to read or write, was convicted despite a ban on torture. Pakistani law also states that children who commit crimes should not face the death penalty.
His lawyer inexplicably failed to ask him his age before trial, Reuters reported.
After news that the Pakistani government had stepped in to stop the execution from going ahead, Maya Foa, of the human rights lawyers' group Reprieve, said: “This decision to stay the execution of a man tortured into 'confessing' to a crime when he was merely a child is hugely welcome.
“It is, however, a shame that it took an outcry and the weight of civil society to push the [Interior] Minister into doing the right thing - just hours before Shafqat was due to be led to the gallows.”
She added that there were likely to be “hundreds more Shafqats on Pakistan's death row”.
On Tuesday, a court had rejected an appeal to stop Mr Hussein's sentence being carried out.
Pakistan had been operating an unofficial moratorium on carrying out executions until this was dropped in December.
Nine prisoners were hanged yesterday, taking the total to 21 this week.
The Independent