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.
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.
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.
The postponement of her execution is only a temporary reprieve – the only way she can be saved is if Mahdi’s family pardons her.
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 (£735,000) and offered it to Mahdi’s family.
“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.
Mahdi’s family, however, have made clear that they will settle for nothing less than her being put to death.
“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.
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”.
“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.
“Any dispute, whatever its reasons and however big, can never justify a murder – let alone dismembering, mutilating and hiding the body.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
In early January, Mahdi al-Mashat, president of the rebel Houthis’ Supreme Political Council, approved her execution.
Nimisha’s mother, a poor domestic helper from Kerala, has been in Yemen since April 2024 in a last-ditch effort to save her.
She has nominated Samuel Jerome, a Yemen-based social worker, to negotiate with Mahdi’s family.
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