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The planned hanging of a paraplegic prisoner in Pakistan has been delayed, his lawyer has said. Abdul Basit could not be hanged in compliance with the jail manual because he is in a wheelchair, a magistrate said when ordering the postponement, according to the BBC.
Pakistan's prison guidelines require that a prisoner stand on the gallows.

Rights groups say hanging a handicapped person would constitute cruel and degrading treatment, and that there is a risk of the hanging going wrong.

Abdul Basit, 43, is paralysed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair after becoming ill in prison. Pakistan reintroduced the death penalty in December 2014 and has hanged 239 people since.

At the time, the government said it was a measure to combat terrorism after the Taliban massacred more than 150 people, most of them children, in a Peshawar school.