A community group has called a public meeting to appeal for justice after 17 Indian men were sentenced to death.

The Leicestershire Indian Workers’ Association began a campaign for a re-trial into the case of the men who are alleged to have been tortured and forced into confessing after a Pakistani man was killed in the United Arab Emirates.

Association General secretary Sital Singh Gill, of Northfields, Leicester, is calling on people to support the campaign. The public meeting will take place at the East Park Road Gurdwara, Evington, from 6.30pm tomorrow.

The men, all from Punjab and aged between 21 and 25, were sentenced to death in March after a fight in the emirate of Sharjah, where a man was stabbed to death.

Lawyers For Human Rights International, campaigning on behalf of the men, said they were tortured in police custody.

Amnesty International said it had information the trial was conducted in Arabic then translated into Hindi, neither of which the men understood.