UAE court again adjourns Indians' death row appeal

SHARJAH: An appeals hearing in Sharjah for 17 Indians sentenced to death for killing a Pakistani was adjourned on Wednesday for the second time for lack of an interpreter.

The Sharjah Court of Appeals has "decided to respond to the request of those present on behalf of the defendants in terms of providing them with a translator who understands their language," the judge said.

The hearing will be adjourned until July 14, he said.

A hearing last month was postponed for the same reason.

"How would you get to this stage and call for executing 17 people without providing them with a translator?" one of the defendants' lawyers, Abdullah Salman, said after the hearing.

The defendants only understand Punjabi. The Indian consulate provided a Punjabi-English translator, but the court proceedings take place in Arabic, so an Arabic-Punjabi translator was needed.

A court of first instance convicted the men on March 29 of beating a Pakistani man to death in a turf dispute between rival bootleg liquor gangs.

One of the defendants could not attend the Wednesday hearing, as he was hospitalised, another of the defendants' lawyers, Mohammed Salman, told AFP.

Salman said he did not know whether or not the hospitalisation was the result of torture.

The head of India's Lawyers For Human Rights International (LFHRI), Navkiran Singh, had said earlier that the defendants were tortured and forced to confess.

After Wednesday's hearing, he told to AFP that a representative from LFHRI had met the jailed Indians and that torture was no longer ongoing.

Death sentences are usually commuted to life in prison in Sharjah and the rest of the United Arab Emirates, of which it is a part.