New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear on July 14 a petition seeking directions to the Centre to use diplomatic channels to save Kerala nurse Nimisha Priya from execution.
Indian national Nimisha Priya, who has been sentenced to death in Yemen for the murder of a Yemeni national, Talal Abdo Mehd and has been in a Yemeni prison for the last three years, is tentatively set to be executed on July 16, following the approval of the Yemeni President Rashad al-Alimi.
After the petition filed by "Save Nimisha Priya Action Council" was mentioned for urgent listing, a Bench of Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Joymalya Bagchi agreed to hear it on July 14, and told the petitioner’s counsel to serve an advance copy of the petition to the Attorney General of India, the highest law officer of the Centre.
The plea, referring to Sharia law, stated that the death penalty could be negotiated with the payment of diya (blood money) to the victim's family.
Nimisha Priya, a nurse from Kollengode in Kerala's Palakkad district, had moved to Yemen in 2008 to support her daily-wage labourer parents. She worked in several hospitals and eventually decided to open her own clinic. In 2017, a dispute arose between her and her Yemeni business partner, Talal Abdo Mahdi, after she reportedly opposed his alleged attempts to misappropriate funds.
According to her family, Nimisha allegedly injected Mahdi with sedatives to retrieve her confiscated passport. Tragically, an overdose led to his death. She was arrested while attempting to flee the country and was convicted of murder in 2018.
In 2020, a trial court in Sanaa sentenced her to death, and Yemen's Supreme Judicial Council upheld the verdict in November 2023, though it left open the option of blood money.
The mother of Priya, Prema Kumari (57), has been tirelessly campaigning to secure a waiver of the death penalty. She has also travelled to Sanaa to negotiate the payment of blood money to the victim's family. Her efforts have been supported by the Save Nimisha Priya International Action Council, a group of NRI social workers based in Yemen.
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