Leeds-born Mirza Tahir Hussain, 36, was convicted of murdering taxi driver Jamshed Khan in 1988 and has been in custody since then. Prison officials in Pakistan today said his execution had been delayed from November 1 for two months after the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened in his plight. The brother of a Briton who has been on death row in Pakistan for 18 years today said the continued postponement of his execution was "torture and murder by a thousand cuts". But Mr Bromberg, for one, will not be satisfied until the waters down at Kasr al-Yahud are flowing more strongly, and clearer, again.. "This a symbolic thing," said Gabriel Gardan, a priest and a doctor of theology.
" It's the right river and it doesn't matter if it's not the exact place." Maybe. But everyone is certain that it was not here, the one place where it is convenient for pilgrims to undergo the ritual all the year around. Which is why Mr Bromberg, who is planning to invite leading environmental scientisis and informers on a cross border water tour in December, will not be giving up his campaign. Just north of Alumot, at Yardenit, a group of Orthodox Christian pilgrims from Romania were yesterday immersing themselves in what is now the only three kilometres - out of more than 200 - of clear lower Jordan river water before coming out and being anointed by a priest, to the low chanting of a hymn celebrating the January feast of the Baptism True, no one is certain exactly where Jesus was baptised. "The whole region has to act but Israel should take the lead because it has taken out 60 per cent of the water and because it has the economic power to do so," he says. That will require a political will which has so far been lacking.
Both the agriculture and the environment ministries are sympathetic, he says, but the all important infrastructure ministry has so far taken against such an Israeli intitiative. Mr Bromberg says his demand is put in perspective by the fact that a new desalination plant on the coast at Ashkelon has a capacity to produce 110m cm of fresh water a year. Professor Zazlavski has pointed out that the energy needed to draw up water from the Galilee basin, 200 metres below sea level is actually less than that required for a desalination plant on the Mediterranean coast. In this he has a powerful new ally in Professor Dun Zazlavski, the first former head of the Water Commission to come out in favour of putting water back into the river. He points out that a recent study by the University of Haifa showed that the tourism opportunities afforded by rehabilitation of the river would actually outweigh the loss to agriculture of rehabilitating the river. And just such a return he believes, would result from the tourism opportunitie, in hiking, cycle trails, bird-watching, and pilgrimages that could result from a " healthier river". Everybody wants you to enjoy the good things about their country, and they want you to realise that it's not as bad as it seems on TV Sometimes you hear bad things about Iran.
