Pakistan has reprieved 7,000 death row inmates and commuted their sentences to life imprisonment, in one of the biggest amnesties in modern history to mark Benazir Bhutto's birthday.

The Cabinet this week approved the reprieve in a special gesture designed to mark the life of the former Prime Minister, who was assassinated late last year and would have turned 55 last month.

Ms Bhutto's Pakistan’s People’s Party (PPP), which swept the national elections after her death, now leads a four-party coalition government.

Amnesty International said the reprieve, which will come into force after being rubber-stamped by President Musharraf, would benefit almost one third of the world’s death row population, which is estimated to be around 24,000. Pakistan is believed to have the largest number of prisoners on death row anywhere in the world.

However, radical Mullahs called on Muslims to protest against the clemency, which they claimed was “un-Islamic”. They warned the government not to interfere Islamic Sharia law.

Maulana Fazalur Rehman, the chief of Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam, which is part of the ruling coalition, has urged the government to revoke the decision, and Islamic leaders said a conference of religious groups was being held at Islamabad’s radical Red Mosque on July 6 to finalise a plan to protest.

The Mullahs have also challenged the decision in the courts, saying under Islamic laws only relatives of murder victims could pardon the offender. In the past, wealthier convicts have often benefitted from this provision and escaped a death sentence by paying compensation to the victim’s family.

The Islamist protest came as came as hundreds of fundamentalist demonstrators ratcheted up the pressure further on President Musharraf today by gathering outside the mosque to mark the year anniversary of the Red Mosque seige.

The seige saw the Pakistani military blitz hundreds of extremists holed up in the Mosque, situated in the heart of the capital. More than 100 people, mostly Islamist activists within the compound, were killed in the raid.

Today's reprieve is not the first time the Pakistani government has pardoned inmates on death row. In 2002, it gave a reprieve to juvenile prisoners facing the death sentence while, in 2006, President Musharraf caved in to international pressure to free Mirza Tahir Hussain, a Briton who had spent more than 14 years on death row.

A senior Pakistani official said the amnesty may not apply to those sentenced on drug trafficking and terrorism charges.

Pakistan has a huge number of condemned prisoners, and there has been marked rise in number of executions in the recent years. Eighty two people were executed last year - almost three times more than the previous year’s figure of 31.

The appalling conditions of the death row prisoners in Pakistan has drawn severe criticism from international rights groups. In a report published last year, Amnesty International disclosed that, in some cases, up to 12 prisoners were being held in 4m-by-3m cells designed for just one prisoner.

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