Khalil Chishti: India court allows convicted Pakistani doctor trip home Published duration 10 May 2012

image caption Khalil Chishti has been in jail or in detention in India for 20 years

India's Supreme Court has allowed a Pakistani doctor, recently released on bail after serving 14 months in prison for a 1992 murder, to visit Pakistan.

Khalil Chishti, 80, was granted bail a day after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's trip to India last month.

The Supreme Court permitted the visit on humanitarian grounds, but he was ordered to return to India to attend his next court hearing on 20 November.

Chishti has always denied the murder charge and says he was framed.

Human rights groups have long campaigned for him to be allowed to return to his home city of Karachi in southern Pakistan.

When Chishti applied for bail he cited his poor health - he has a heart condition and is wheelchair-bound.

In January 2011 he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for killing a man after a fight in the Indian town of Ajmer in 1992

He was found guilty after an unusually long 18-year trial during which he was put under house arrest.

The doctor, who was born in Ajmer, was in Pakistan at the time of the partition in 1947 and did not return to India until 1992 when he came to visit his ailing mother. He has been either in jail or detention in India since then.