India will take up the issue of the safe homecoming of Sarabjit Singh, sentenced to death in Pakistan, with Islamabad in January, his sister Dalbir Kaur said on Sunday.
Dalbir said External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee in New Delhi assured her that he will raise the issue with the Pakistan government during his visit.
Mukherjee is visiting Pakistan in January 2007 to invite President Pervez Musharraf to participate in the SAARC summit to be hosted by India in April 2007.
She said that Mukherjee also assured her that he would ask Islamabad to provide all necessary medical treatment to Sarabjit, now lodged at Kotlakhpat Rai Jail in Lahore.
"I am quite optimistic that the top leadership of both countries would find out a way to save my brother's life. I understand that President Pervez Musharraf would be kind enough to find out the way for the safe homecoming of Sarabjit so that he could join the company of his wife, sister and two teenaged daughters," Dalbir said.
A few months back, Dalbir had received a hand written letter from Sarabjit, where he claimed that he was losing his eyesight and multiple images appear before his eyes and that the Pakistan government was reluctant to provide necessary treatment inside the jail. Though Sarabjit's petition for mercy from death sentence, awarded to him in connection with a case relating to the 1990 Lahore blast that killed 14 people, is pending, he faces one more case for three other bomb blasts.
Earlier in his petitions to various courts, including Pakistan's Supreme Court, Sarabjit said that he had inadvertently crossed the border and later caught by the police and wrongly implicated in the cases.