A convicted Indian spy on death row in Pakistan was unconscious and on a ventilator in a Lahore hospital after suffering head injuries in a jail attack by fellow prisoners.
Pakistani doctors were working to revive Sarabjit Singh, according to a statement issued Saturday by the country’s Foreign Ministry in Islamabad. In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the attack “very sad,” Press Trust of India reported, adding that Indian officials had been granted access to the injured man.
Sarabjit Singh was arrested in 1990 and later found guilty of spying and involvement in deadly bomb blasts in Pakistani cities. His family has said the man is from a border village in the northern Indian state of Punjab and had crossed the frontier by mistake.
The attack may spark fresh tension between Pakistan and India, nuclear-armed neighbors that in January and February engaged in some of their most serious cross-border skirmishes in almost a decade in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. The fighting strained efforts to repair ties shattered by the Mumbai terrorist strike in 2008.
India last year executed the only one of 10 Pakistani gunmen to be captured alive during the Mumbai attack. It has since executed a Kashmiri man found guilty of playing a role in a 2001 raid on India’s Parliament.
“He was attacked by two prisoners with steel bars and bricks in jail,” Sarabjit Singh’s lawyer, Awais Sheikh, said by phone from Lahore. “Jail authorities are responsible. It’s criminal negligence.”
India and Pakistan resumed peace talks in 2011 more than two years after they were broken off after the attack by Pakistani militants on Mumbai that killed 166 people.
Front Section, Pages 15 on 04/28/2013