Haroon Siddique and agencies[/*]

The Guardian, Sunday 28 October 2012 18.43 GMT[/*][/list]
Khadija Shah, from Birmingham, is said to be back in prison near Islamabad after giving birth to daughter in hospital


A British woman who could face the death penalty in Pakistan after being arrested on drug smuggling charges has been returned to prison with her newborn daughter after giving birth in hospital, a legal charity has reported.



Khadija Shah, 25, gave birth to her baby girl Malaika a few weeks ago but was sent back from hospital to Adiala prison near the capital, Islamabad, Reprieve said on Sunday. The birth had not previously been reported.



The baby has had no immunisations and has already had to be hospitalised when she developed severe diarrhoea in the unsanitary prison, said the charity.



Shah, from Birmingham, was arrested in May after £3.2m of heroin was allegedly found in her luggage as she tried to fly home from Islamabad airport. She denies the charges, claiming she did not know what was in the bags. She says she was on a family holiday and was asked to carry extra suitcases, in which 63kg of heroin split into 123 packages was found.



"To keep a baby behind bars is truly barbaric," the Reprieve investigator Sultana Noon said. "Malaika is weak and suffering from terrible health problems while Khadija faces execution. No mother would wish this scenario on their worst enemy."



The charity had earlier complained that she was receiving inadequate care in the prison, where there had been an outbreak of tuberculosis.



Shah's last bail request was dropped by her lawyers in August after it appeared it would be refused by judges and the prison authorities had insisted that she would not be allowed out to give birth unless complications arose.



Shah has a four-year-old daughter and a son aged five, who were originally held in jail with her. They were later freed into the custody of their grandmother who took them back to the UK. Both of the children caught chickenpox while in prison, according to Clive Stafford Smith, from Reprieve.



He warned that the conditions in the jail posed a greater threat to Shah and her child than the possibility of getting the death penalty.



Criminal cases can take years to complete in Pakistan's legal system and mothers are often imprisoned with children while their cases are heard.