See pictures of Mirza-Tahir Hussain reunited with his family

Sentenced to death in 1989 for a murder that he insists he did not commit, Mirza-Tahir Hussain, then 19, from Leeds, spent the next 17 years locked up with some of Pakistan’s most violent criminals. It was, he told The Times, “sheer hell”.

Inmates on Rawalpindi’s death row regularly attacked each other, he said. They dealt in drugs. Many had home-made knives. Some younger inmates were sexually assaulted. The authorities always put more than two prisoners in a cell so there was someone to break up fights. The quieter prisoners banded together to protect themselves but “we always feared for our safety”, Mr Hussain said.

The physical conditions were almost as grim. Mr Hussain shared a 12ft (3.65m) by 8ft cell with two or three other prisoners. Each cell had two high windows, barred and glassless, so it was freezing in winter and baking in summer. The inmates slept on blankets on the concrete floor, and sometimes at night mice or rats would come up from the cell’s hole-in-the ground latrine and run over them.

There were a few redeeming factors. The cells had caged forecourts looking out on walled gardens. The food was edible. Prisoners could receive food parcels, books and magazines, and have radios and televisions. They were allowed two hours’ exercise a day, four visitors a week and to send and receive four letters every fifteen days. Mr Hussain spent five years of his imprisonment in a Lahore prison pursuing a BA in political science.

But his ordeal was made worse by a tortuous legal process that amounted to a cruel and unusual punishment in itself. In 1989 he had been sentenced to death. In 1992 the High Court ordered a retrial. In 1994 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1996 the High Court acquitted him, only to refer his case one month later to the Federal Sharia Court, which has jurisdiction over cases of highway robbery. In 1998 a split Sharia court sentenced him to death for a second time and, in 2003, the Supreme Sharia Court rejected his appeal. From last May until Mr Hussain’s release this month, General Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan, issued no fewer than four stays of execution.

A rollercoaster? “It was worse than that,” replied Mr Hussain, who recalled how his euphoria when the High Court acquitted him in 1996 turned to despair when it referred him to the Sharia court. When that court sentenced him to death for a second time, “I was shattered,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. It just broke me down. I thought I would never get out of this evil web.”

Another low point was the death of his father, aged 82, in 2003. He had spent months in Pakistan each year, seeking to help his son. Mr Hussain has no doubt that his father’s death was hastened by grief. Indeed, his father felt betrayed by his native country and insisted that he was not to be buried in Pakistan. “It was one of the saddest moments of my life,” Mr Hussain said. “I wasn’t close to him when he needed me most.”

As Mr Hussain’s predicament worsened, so he turned to Islam. It was what many prisoners did when they realised that no lawyers or courts would save them, he said. He gave up reading novels such as Gone With the Wind and the James Herriot books. He began rising at 4am to study the Koran and other religious works. He dedicated his life to Allah. He survived, he said, “because I kept praying and kept close to religion”.

There were moments of hopelessness when he would lie awake at night and imagine his own execution. “The Devil starts playing tricks with you,” he said. “Evil thoughts start rushing into your mind. Where is Allah? Why is he letting this happen? What’s the benefit of believing in one God? It’s the Devil trying to lead you astray.”

Towards the end, as he was being kept alive only by successive stays of execution, Mr Hussain began almost to long for the peace that death would bring. He told his relatives to stop campaigning for him. They refused. “They advised me not to lose hope and be patient,” he recalled. “They said they would fight to the end.”

That fight was led by Mr Hussain’s elder brother, Amjad. In 2004, after the death of their father and the failure of Hussain’s final appeal, he gave up his £30,000-a-year job as an analytical scientist with a pharmaceutical company in Leeds to campaign full-time for his brother.

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