China's top court approved the death sentence of a former medical student who poisoned his roommate, a lawyer for the family said on Wednesday.

Xie Tongxiang, the lawyer representing the family of Lin Senhao, 29, said Lin's father had received a notice from a Shanghai court on Tuesday in which a judicial official said the Supreme People's Court had approved a lower court's decision in the case, and said he could see his son before Friday.

Lin was sentenced to death in the first trial at Shanghai No 2 Intermediate People's Court in February 2014 for killing his roommate, Huang Yang, by putting a deadly poison in Huang's water dispenser at Fudan University in Shanghai. Huang died in April 2013 of liver, kidney and lung failure after suffering two weeks of illness.