India News, Nimisha Priya Case: Yemeni President Rashad al-Alimi has approved the death sentence of Indian nurse Nimisha Priya, who has been serving a prison sentence for killing a Yemeni citizen since 2017. According to media reports, the sentence will be executed within a month. Reacting to this development, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said on Monday (December 30, 2024), that India is aware of the sentence of Nimisha Priya in Yemen. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a statement, "We understand that Priya's family is considering relevant options. The government is providing all possible assistance in this matter."
For your information, let us tell you that Nimisha Priya was found guilty of killing Yemeni citizen Talal Abdo Mahdi in 2017. A year later, she was sentenced to death by a trial court in Yemen. Since then her family has been fighting for her release. They approached the Supreme Court of Yemen against the trial court order, but their appeal was rejected in 2023. Now, the country's President has also rejected Priya's appeal, so her release depends on securing forgiveness from the victim's family and their tribal leaders.
According to a report by Manorama Online, her mother Prema Kumari has been trying to negotiate with the victim's family for blood money, but the talks came to an abrupt halt in September after Indian embassy-appointed lawyer Abdullah Ameer demanded a pre-negotiation fee of $20,000 (around Rs 16.6 lakh). The foreign ministry had already provided Ameer $19,871 in July, but he insisted on a total fee of $40,000 to be paid in two instalments before resuming negotiations.
The Save Nimisha Priya International Action Council managed to raise the first instalment of Ameer’s fee through crowdfunding. However, they later reportedly faced challenges in ensuring transparency to donors about how the funds were being used.
Nimisha Priya, a native of Palakkad in Kerala, is a trained nurse who worked in private hospitals in Yemen for a few years. Her husband and minor daughter returned to India in 2014 for financial reasons. The same year, Yemen was hit by a civil war, and they could not return, as the country had stopped issuing new visas. Later in 2015, Priya sought Mahdi's support to set up her clinic in Sana'a, as under Yemeni law, only citizens are allowed to set up clinics and business firms.
According to his appeal filed in the Yemani Supreme Court, Mahdi accompanied Priya to Kerala in 2015 when she came for a month-long vacation. During this trip, he stole her wedding photograph, which he later tampered with to claim that she was married to him. On their return, when Priya started a clinic, Mahdi started embezzling all the revenue. He also falsified the ownership documents of the clinic. When Nimisha Priya confronted him about the embezzlement, he turned hostile towards her.
He also started siphoning off money from her monthly income after telling everyone that Priya was his wife and even tampered with their photographs to show them married. In her petition, Priya alleged that the harassment soon turned into physical torture and Mahdi also confiscated her passport. According to her petition, Priya also approached the police in Sana'a over the matter, but instead of taking action against Mahdi, the police arrested her and put her in jail for six days. In July 2017, Priya approached the warden of a jail near her clinic where Mahdi was earlier jailed under various charges.
According to the information, to get the passport back from Mahdi, Nimisha injected him with anaesthesia. But the dose of anaesthesia injection turned into an overdose and Mahdi died. After this, Nimisha, along with her colleague Hanan, cut Mahdi's body into pieces and threw his body in a water tank. For your information, let us tell you that Hanan is a citizen of Yemen. In this case, Nimisha was sentenced to death in the year 2018, while Hanan was sentenced to life imprisonment. Let us tell you that Nimisha also has an 8-year-old son. Nimisha has been working in Sana'a, Yemen since 2018.
A system has been in place for years in Yemen, including Arab countries, which is called 'blood money'. This word means the money that is given to the family of the deceased so that the life of the criminal can be saved. In a way, it is a huge amount of compensation, which is given to the family of the deceased as damages. According to this, if the family of the deceased wants, they can compromise with the murderer and forgive him by taking some money. There were also reports that Mahdi's family had demanded 5 crore Yemeni Riyals from Nimisha's family as blood money. That is, this amount is Rs 1.52 crore in Indian currency.
PC:India News
