Briton freed from Pakistan jail could hear hangings

LONDON, Nov 27 (Reuters) A Briton who spent 18 years facing the death sentence in Pakistan for a murder he says he did not commit told today of the horror of hearing the sounds of fellow prisoners being executed just metres away.

Mirza Tahir Hussain was freed from jail earlier this month after President Pervez Musharraf commuted his death sentence to a life term. He returned to Britain on November 18 at the age of 36, having spent almost 18 years behind bars.

In one of his first interviews since arriving back in Britain, Hussain described how he spent his years in a small cell with as many as eight other death row prisoners.

He said inmates were taken from the cell straight to the gallows, about three metres away, at one day's notice. ''They just snatch them away from our hands,'' he told BBC radio.

''We can hear the guards and all the officials gathering for this purpose and when the inmate is made to stand on the trap door and when the trap door opens and when he's hanged, we could hear all that.'' Hussain, a British Muslim of Pakistani descent, was originally acquitted of the killing by Pakistan's High Court but an Islamic court sentenced him to death in 1998. The sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003.

Hussain insisted he was acting in self defence when the man he was convicted of killing, taxi driver Jamshed Khan, was shot.

He said Khan ordered him at gunpoint to hand over his wallet and get out of the car and threatened to molest him. Khan said Hussain should follow his orders ''otherwise he'll shoot me'', Hussain said.

''I didn't want to move, you know, but he was pointing the gun at me and signalling me to move.

''So at a point when the gun was not aiming at me, I went for the gun and grabbed his wrists ... and in that ensuing scuffle the gun suddenly went off.'' Prime Minister Tony Blair and heir to the throne Prince Charles had raised Hussain's case with Musharraf in the weeks before his eventual release.

Hussain thanked Prince Charles for his intervention, but said he wished the government had acted more quickly.

REUTERS PB BD1520