After spending almost half of his life on death row, Wajeeh-ul-Hassan had given up hope that he would ever be freed.
Convicted of committing blasphemy and sentenced to death by a court in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore in 2002 - when he was 25 - he spent almost 19 years in jail in a country where the crime of insulting Islam, its Prophet Muhammad or its holy book, the Quran, has been at the centre of alleged rights abuses for decades.
