The execution of an Indian nurse who is on death row in Yemen has been postponed at the eleventh hour amid negotiations for a pardon.
Nimisha Priya, 38, from the southern Indian state of Kerala, was found guilty of murdering her business partner in 2017 and was sentenced to death in 2020.
Priya has denied killing Talal Abdo Mahdi, a Yemeni national who co-owned a clinic with her in Sanaa and whose chopped-up remains were found in a water tank.
The Indian foreign ministry sources said 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”.
The ministry's officials had been in regular contact with Yemeni jail authorities and the prosecutor's office there.
The postponement of the sentencing is only a temporary relief for Priya, as only a pardon by the victim’s family can save her from the imminent execution.
According to Yemen’s Islamic judicial system, murder, drug trafficking, apostasy, adultery, and same-sex relations are punished by death and it allows a murder convict to be pardoned by the victim’s kin in exchange for diyat, or “blood money”.
Her family in India has said they have already raised $1m (£735,000) and offered the money to Mahdi's family, which is reluctant to pardon her.
Samuel Jerome Baskaran, a social worker who has been negotiating on behalf of the nurse with Yemeni officials and the victim’s family, said the postponement came after the ruler of the Al Wasab region met the president of Yemen on Friday on his request while the Indian government also got involved, according to The Indian Express.
He said a plea from Priya’s mother, Prema Kumari, requesting a postponement, was formally submitted.
On Saturday, the president of Yemen Rashad al-Alimi consented to defer the execution, he said, adding that a directive not to disclose further details about the case or the postponement, possibly was issued due to its sensitivity.
“The final step (to stop the execution) is the consent from the Talal family. The key to Nimisha’s life rests with the family of Talal. They have to forgive her, and our job is to convince the family to forgive her,” he said.
Mahdi's family have said they only want to implement God’s Law in Qisas, which means retaliation in kind and said they have suffered from the brutal crime.
His brother, Abdelfattah Mahdi, told BBC Arabic that they have suffered at the hands of the exhausting litigation process and called it a “horrible and heinous” crime case.
"Any dispute, whatever its reasons and however big, can never justify a murder – let alone dismembering, mutilating and hiding the body."
Priya arrived in Yemen to work as a nurse in 2008. She launched a clinic in partnership with Mehdi, in line with Yemeni law that required foreign entrepreneurs to collaborate with citizens.
However, she was arrested in 2017 after Mahdi was murdered and his body was found in a tank.
Her family previously alleged that Priya faced mental, physical and financial abuse at his hands. She had even filed a police complaint against him in 2016, leading to his brief arrest. He allegedly resumed threatening her after getting out.
In 2020, a local court sentenced her to death. The decision was challenged in the Supreme Court but the appeal was rejected in 2023.
The nurse’s mother, a domestic worker in Kochi city, has been in Yemen for the past year trying to save her daughter.
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