Indian spy attacked in Pakistan jail dies

An Indian national on death row in Pakistan who was attacked last week by fellow inmates died early Thursday from his injuries, his lawyer and a doctor said. Sarabjit Singh, who was sentenced to death 16 years ago on espionage charges, died at 1:00 am local time (2000 GMT) after lying in a comatose state for the last five days, a senior doctor at Jinnah hospital in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore told AFP. Singh's lawyer Owais Sheikh confirmed the 49-year-old's death and said that his body "has been moved to the hospital mortuary". The doctor who spoke to AFP said arrangements were under way for an autopsy. Singh sustained several injuries, including a fractured skull, when six prisoners attacked him on Friday last week, hitting him on the head with bricks. "(His death) was already feared. His condition was more than critical and he had less chances of survival," Sheikh said. Sheikh earlier told AFP that his client had received threats following the execution of a Kashmiri separatist in India. Mohammed Afzal Guru was hanged in New Delhi on February 9 for his part in a deadly Islamist attack on the Indian parliament in 2001. Singh was convicted for his alleged involvement in a string of bomb attacks in Pakistan's Punjab province that killed 14 people in 1990. His mercy petitions were rejected by the courts and former president Pervez Musharraf. His family insisted he was a victim of mistaken identity and had inadvertently strayed across the border while drunk. Four members of Singh's family -- his wife, two daughters and his sister -- who travelled to Lahore on Tuesday have since returned to India, according to the Press Trust of India. A senior official in Delhi had said diplomats from the high commission in Islamabad were not allowed to visit Singh in hospital, and had also complained about a lack of information on the prisoner's condition. The Pakistan foreign ministry however insisted Indian diplomats in Lahore were given access to Singh on two occasions. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) condemned the attack on Singh as a "dastardly act" and called on the government to make a thorough inquiry into the matter and punish the guilty persons. "The authorities have obviously failed to do their elementary duty" of providing him safety and security, the commission said in a statement. The attack made front-page news in Indian newspapers, with Indian television stations running frequent updates on his condition and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh describing it as a "very sad incident". Pakistan last year released an Indian man who had served three decades in a Pakistani jail on espionage charges. Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India have fought three wars since the division of the subcontinent in 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which is divided between them and claimed by both.