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Change Your Life! |
Pakistan frees Indian soldier caught spying after 26 years |
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April 15, 2000
LAHORE, APR 14 (AP) - After spending 26 years in prison in Pakistan on spying charges, an Indian soldier, Roop Lal, returned home to India Friday, Pakistani officials said.
"This is my dream, to go home to see my daughter," Lal told reporters at the Lahore International Airport before boarding a commercial airliner to the Indian capital of New Delhi.
Lal was arrested in 1974 and found guilty on eight counts of spying, officials said, asking not to be identified by name. Lal was sentenced to death,
He stayed in jail in Sahiwal, 160 kilometers (96 miles) southwest of Lahore, on death row.
Then in the late-1990s, his daughter Sunita Chawala sent a letter to Gen. Jehangir Karamat, who was then Pakistan's army chief, pleading for her father's life.
Karamat commuted the death sentence to life. In Pakistan a life sentence is 25 years. On Friday Lal was freed.
"Every night I dreamed to see my daughter, who is in New Delhi," he said. "Now my dream is a reality."
A representative of the Indian High Commission in Pakistan reportedly accompanied Lal to India.
Pakistan and India routinely accuse the other of espionage. Several times in recent years the two countries have expelled each other's diplomats on charges of spying.
Pakistan and India have fought three wars since the subcontinent gained its independence from Britain in 1947 and Pakistan was created as a homeland for Muslims of the region. The last war was fought in 1971 over Bangladesh, or what was then East Pakistan.
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