India returns bodies of 2 Pakistani prisoners

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan expressed "deep concern" over the treatment of Pakistani prisoners in Indian jails after the bodies of a young man and an old woman were handed over at the border on Friday.

"We have called upon the Indian authorities to thoroughly investigate the causes leading to the deaths of these unfortunate Pakistani prisoners," a foreign office spokesman said in a statement.

Many Pakistanis were angered earlier this year when the bodies of two other prisoners were returned, after Pakistan had released a Indian man who had been sentence to hang for spying.

Relatives waited at the Wagah border on the outskirts of the eastern city of Lahore to receive the bodies of Rashida Bibi, a woman in her sixties, and Abdul Alim, a man in his mid-twenties.

Alim was arrested in 2001 while crossing into India, and Bibi was taken into custody upon her arrival in India in 2006, relatives told journalists.

Bibi died last month after collapsing while being taken to court in Amritsar, the Indian city across the border from Lahore, while Alim was said to have been having treatment for a medical condition.

Relatives said they found no signs of physical abuse on the bodies, but they would request autopsies.

The Pakistani spokesman hoped that the Pakistan-India judicial committee on prisoners would take note of the matter when it goes to meet Pakistani prisoners in Indian jails.

The nuclear-armed rivals began a peace process more than four years ago, having gone to the brink of a fourth war in 2002.

(Reporting by Mubasher Bukhari; Writing by Augustine Anthony)