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Authorities in Yemen have postponed the execution of an Indian nurse who is on death row after being found guilty of murder, Indian foreign ministry sources say.<\/p>\n
Nimisha Priya, who was sentenced to death for killing a local man, was set to be executed on 16 July, according to campaigners working to save her.<\/p>\n
The nurse, who is from the southern Indian state of Kerala, denied murdering her former business partner Talal Abdo Mahdi, whose chopped-up body was discovered in a water tank in 2017. <\/p>\n
The postponement of her execution is only a temporary reprieve – the only way she can be saved is if Mahdi’s family pardons her. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Yemen’s Islamic judicial system, known as Sharia, offers her one last hope – securing a pardon from the victim’s family by paying diyah, or blood money, to them. Her relatives and supporters say they have raised $1m (\u00a3735,000) and offered it to Mahdi’s family.<\/p>\n
“We are still trying to save her. But ultimately the family has to agree for pardon,” Babu John, a member of the Save Nimisha Priya International Action Council, told the BBC last week after the date for her execution was set.<\/p>\n
Mahdi’s family, however, have made clear that they will settle for nothing less than her being put to death.<\/p>\n
“Our stance on the attempts at reconciliation is clear; we insist on implementing God’s Law in Qisas [retaliation in kind], nothing else,” his brother, Abdelfattah Mahdi, told BBC Arabic on Monday, before the execution was postponed.<\/p>\n
He added that his family had suffered “not only from the brutal crime but also the long, exhausting litigation process in a horrible and heinous but obvious crime case”.<\/p>\n
“We feel sorry to see the attempts to distort the truth, especially from the Indian media that portrays the convicted as a victim, to justify the crime. And we say it clearly that they are aiming to influence public opinion,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Any dispute, whatever its reasons and however big, can never justify a murder – let alone dismembering, mutilating and hiding the body.”<\/p>\n
The Indian foreign ministry sources said on Tuesday that its officials had been in touch regularly with jail authorities and the prosecutor’s office in Yemen, where there has been a civil war since 2011.<\/p>\n
The government “made concerted efforts in recent days to seek more time for the family of Ms Nimisha Priya to reach a mutually agreeable solution with the other party”, they said.<\/p>\n
Nimisha Priya left Kerala for Yemen in 2008 to work as a nurse. She was arrested in 2017 after Mahdi’s body was discovered. The 34-year-old is presently lodged in the central jail in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital.<\/p>\n
In 2020, a local court sentenced her to death. Her family challenged the decision in Yemen’s Supreme Court, but their appeal was rejected in 2023.<\/p>\n
In early January, Mahdi al-Mashat, president of the rebel Houthis’ Supreme Political Council, approved her execution.<\/p>\n
Nimisha’s mother, a poor domestic helper from Kerala, has been in Yemen since April 2024 in a last-ditch effort to save her. <\/p>\n
She has nominated Samuel Jerome, a Yemen-based social worker, to negotiate with Mahdi’s family. <\/p>\n
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