Top Pak diplomat to visit 'critical' Sanaullah in India

NEW DELHI: Pakistan's top diplomat in New Delhi is to pay a hospital visit Monday to a Pakistani prisoner who was critically injured in an attack by an inmate in an Indian jail, officials said.

Convicted murderer Sanaullah suffered multiple head injuries in a prison in Indian occupied city of Jammu in an apparent tit-for-tat attack after an Indian prisoner, Sarabjit Singh, was fatally assaulted in Pakistan.

Last week, Sanaullah was airlifted to a government hospital in the city of Chandigarh, 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of New Delhi.

"The Pakistani High Commissioner, Salman Bashir is visiting the hospital where Sanaullah is being treated. He wanted to get a medical update," the press officer at the Pakistan High Commission, Manzoor Ali Memon, told AFP.

Memon said the embassy is also making travel arrangements for Sanaullah's family in Pakistan to cross the border and visit him in the hospital.

A spokeswoman for the government hospital said Sanaullah was in the intensive care unit and on a ventilator as his condition "continues to remain critical".

Sanaullah, who hails from the city of Sialkot in Pakistan, was attacked by a prisoner who was identified as a former Indian army soldier nearly 24 hours after Singh's death in Lahore.

The prison violence could aggravate tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, whose relations were hit by a border flare-up earlier this year.

According to the Indian government, 535 Indian prisoners, including 483 fishermen, are in Pakistani jails, while 272 Pakistani prisoners are behind bars in India.