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		</div><p>Pakistan has postponed the execution of the country’s first known paraplegic on death-row, about an hour before he was to be hanged.</p>
<p>The man’s family welcomed the development with relief and urged authorities to spare his life on medical grounds.</p>
<p>The day before, Pakistan’s Supreme Court refused to halt the execution of 43-year-old Abdul Basit, who has been paralysed from the waist down since contracting meningitis in prison in 2010 and uses a wheelchair.</p>
<p>Basit has been on death row since 2009, convicted of murdering a man in a financial dispute in Punjab province.</p>
<p>According to prison official Mohammad Safdar, a magistrate made the decision to postpone the death sentence after talking to Basit.</p>
<p>The hanging was initially scheduled for just before dawn.<br />
There were no further details on the postponement and it was unclear if another date for the executions was set.</p>
<p>Under Pakistani law, authorities can delay executions on medical grounds but a convict can only be pardoned by the country’s president.</p>
<p>There was no immediate statement from President Mamnoon Hussain.</p>
<p>Basit&#8217;s family members were waiting outside the high-security prison in the city of Faisalabad in eastern Punjab province for the sentence to be carried out so they could take the body for burial.</p>
<p>His sister, Shugufta Sultana, said they were “terrified and nervous”.</p>
<p>“We were waiting for bad news but God gave a new life to my brother and his execution was postponed,” she said.</p>
<p>Basit’s lawyers and the rights group Reprieve had petitioned Pakistan’s top court to halt the execution, arguing that hanging him would constitute cruel and inhuman punishment.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, Reprieve’s caseworker Kate Higham also welcomed the postponement, saying the execution would have violated “both the prison’s own rules and Pakistan’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment”.</p>
<p>Earlier, Amnesty International also urged Pakistan to halt Basit’s execution and called for a moratorium on all executions in the country.</p>
<p>According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, authorities have hanged 236 people since lifting a 2008 moratorium on executions in December, after a deadly Taliban attack on a school in the northwestern city of Peshawar killed 150 people, mostly children.</p>
<p>But only one in 10 of the 236 prisoners executed since then have been convicted of a terror attack. International rights groups, including Reprieve and Amnesty, have urged Pakistan to stop executions.</p>
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