Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, July 17: The chances of the Kerala-born nurse Nimisha Priya, currently on death row in a prison in Yemen for allegedly killing her local business partner, looks very remote as the family members of the deceased Yemeni citizen were refusing to accept any plea for pardon or even to commute her death sentence to life imprisonment and insist she must face the ‘Qisas‘, or ‘God’s law,’ the Islamic law of “an eye for an eye.”
India is offering all possible help to the family of Nimisha Priya as she remains on the death row for killing of Talal Abdo Mahdi. Ms Priya was to be executed on Wednesday but sustained diplomatic pressure brought her a temporary reprieve hoping for a negotiated settlement of “blood money” with his family but his brother Abdelfattah Mahdi on Thursday rejected any settlement and insisted she must face ‘justice’ as written in the Koran.
The 38-year old Priya remains on the death row though no second execution date has yet been set. She has only to rely on the efforts of the Indian government and social activists working to convince Mr Mahdi’s family to issue a pardon or, at the very least, agree to commute her death sentence.
“This is a sensitive matter and the government of India has been offering all possible assistance in the case. We have provided legal assistance and appointed a lawyer to assist the family. We have also arranged regular consular visits and been in constant touch with the local authorities and the family members to resolve the issue,” Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a press briefing on Thursday.
“This included concerted efforts in recent days to seek more time for the family of Nimisha Priya to reach a mutually agreeable solution with the other party. The local authorities in Yemen have postponed carrying out her sentence… We continue to closely follow the matter and render all possible assistance. We are also in touch with some friendly governments,” Mr Jaiswal said. In 2020, a Yemeni court handed her the death sentence and the country’s Supreme Judicial Council dismissed her appeal in November 2023. The 38-year-old nurse is currently in a jail in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital city that is under the control of Iran-backed Houthis.
India doesn’t have any diplomatic presence in Yemen and diplomats in the Indian mission in Saudi Arabia were looking into the matter. Nimisha Priya’s mother Premakumari travelled to Yemen last year as part of efforts to secure her release. The Indian side had even explored the option of securing her release through “diyat” or paying “blood money”. But that also ran into some problems.
The government on Monday told the Supreme Court that it was doing whatever was “utmost possible” to save the Indian nurse from execution. The government also said “nothing much” could be done keeping in view the status of Yemen. “There is a point up to which the government of India can go and we have reached that point,” Attorney General R Venkataramani told a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta.
In a Facebook post this week Mr Mahdi acknowledged mediation and reconciliation attempts on Ms Priya’s behalf but stressed, “… our demand is clear: Qisas and nothing else, no matter what.” ‘Qisas‘ is a term in Islamic jurisprudence. It is similar to the biblical concept of ‘an eye for an eye’, i.e., victims of a crime are entitled to ‘reciprocal justice’. The Arabic word ‘qisas‘ translates as ‘retaliation’ or ‘retribution’. It finds repeated mention in the Koran.
The faint hope Ms Priya still has is that postponing her execution without asking Mahdi family indicated that the Yemen government is listening. Sources said the Indian embassy in neighbouring Saudi Arabia is leading this effort, with help from a private individual, Samuel Jerome, an Indian citizen living in Sanaa. Mr Jerome said the family had been angered by the media’s focus on ‘blood money’ but indicated he would try to repair broken ties with the brother.
Ms Priya travelled from Kerala’s Palakkad to Yemen in 2011, hunting for a well-paying job to support her parents. After a few years in a hospital there, she set up her own medical clinic. Yemen laws require foreign nationals to partner with citizens to set up a business. Mr Mahdi was that business partner for her venture. There are also reports that she later married him. But the relationship deteriorated rapidly after she accused him of harassment and stealing from her. Mr Mahdi, she claimed, then hid her passport so she couldn’t leave.
In 2017 Ms Priya tried to drug Mr Mahdi so she could recover the passport. Unfortunately he died under medication and the nurse – who tried to hide his body by cutting it up and dumping it in a water tank – was caught trying to flee the country. She was convicted of murder in March 2018 and sentenced to death two years later.
