He is a man I had met for less than an hour before this last weekend, but there was in the circumstances only one appropriate form of greeting when we again came face to face: we hugged.

Seven weeks ago I interviewed Mirza-Tahir Hussain when he was behind bars on death row in the Central Jail, Rawalpindi, facing imminent death by hanging. This time he was restored to his family in Leeds, a free man ready to tell his extraordinary story exclusively to The Times.

This is a British citizen who has spent 18 years — half his life — in Pakistani prisons for a murder he always denied. He is a man who has been tried four times for the same alleged crime and sentenced to death twice, to life imprisonment once and acquitted once. He has spent 12 years on death row, in two stretches, and escaped the gallows this year by virtue of four consecutive stays of execution.

In the end Mr Hussain was saved largely through the efforts of his older brother Amjad, who waged a campaign that sucked in presidents, prime ministers and princes but nearly bankrupted the family in the process. “It is incredible. I still cannot believe I am really free,” said Mr Hussain, 36, who has changed beyond recognition. In prison he had long, greying hair and straggling white beard. Today he is clean shaven, with neat, black-dyed hair and looks ten years younger. He is clearly still a little bewildered, but he is beginning to laugh and smile again.

We met in the red-brick, end-ofterrace house in the racially mixed Hyde Park district of Leeds from which Mr Hussain, as a headstrong 18-year-old, had set off on a solo visit to his native Pakistan in December 1988 in defiance of his parents’ wishes.

In the course of the first interview he has given since his release, Hussain talked with manifest pain of that night 18 years ago when he shot his taxi driver in what he insists was self-defence. In halting English he talked of his years locked up with some of Pakistan’s most violent criminals, of seeing dozens of his fellow death-row inmates marched off to the gallows, and of how towards the end of his ordeal he almost craved death.

Over many cups of tea, and as his four young nephews rampaged around the house, he described the euphoria of his sudden release 12 days ago and his tearful reunions with his family, and he spoke of the difficulty of adjusting to a world that has left him behind.

He has no idea how to use a computer, operate cable television or use a digital camera. Indeed with his slow, deliberate speech and his excessive courtesy and gentle manners, he seems almost to belong to an earlier age, perhaps that of his father.

Mirza-Fazal Hussain was a member of the British Indian Army who fought in Burma during the Second World War. He later went to work for Occidental Oil in Libya, moved to Luton in the 1960s to work for Vauxhall and ended up as a machinist for a car components factory in Leeds.

He brought his family over from Pakistan in 1978 when Amjad was ten and Tahir eight. Both boys went to Lawnswood High School. Tahir left in the summer of 1988 having performed better as a bowler on the cricket pitch than as a student in the classroom. Emulating his father, perhaps, he had joined the Territorial Army in search of adventure and was hoping to enlist in the regular army.

That December lots of things happened. Britain was caught in the salmonella-in-eggs scare. Pan Am flight 103 was destroyed by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie. A commuter train crash at Clapham Junction killed 35 and British Muslims burnt copies of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.

Mr Hussain, fit, confident and fresh from his TA training, announced that he was going to pay a surprise visit to his relatives in the village of Bhubur, 80 miles south of Rawalpindi, where he had spent the first eight years of his life. His parents tried to dissuade him from travelling alone, but he insisted and they paid his fare.

Amjad saw him on to a flight from Heathrow to Karachi, where he spent a night with an aunt. The next day she put him on a train to Rawalpindi. He arrived at about 11pm, a naive teenager in a country filled with hazards for the unsuspecting.

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