PALAKKAD : The mother of Nimisha Priya, who is convicted of the 2017 murder of a Yemeni national Talal Abdo Mahdi, has requested the public to help them raise the blood money to save Nimisha from death row.
Addressing mediapersons of Palakkad from Yemen via video conference on Tuesday, Nimisha’s mother Prema Kumari feared that Yemen’s Supreme Judicial Council that rejected Nimisha’s appeal in November last year would ‘take the final step’ soon and only the blood money can save her from the execution.
“After years of efforts by members of Save Nimisha Priya International Action Council and the state and Union governments, the Indian Embassy in Djibouti has appointed a lawyer who is a Yemeni national and agreed to find mediators willing to negotiate for Nimisha and provide other assistance. However, as per the Yemeni tribal laws and practices, only their heads could carry out the negotiations with Mahdi’s family,” Kumari, who went to Yemen’s capital Sana’a in April to meet her daughter, narrated the updates.
Yemen follows Sharia law which allows for a pardon if the victim’s family accepts ‘blood money’.
The action council members estimate the total blood money to be around Rs 3 crore. “However, as per the rules in Yemen, where India doesn’t have diplomatic presence, we cannot negotiate directly with Mahdi’s family, but only through the heads of their tribal communities. We need to immediately raise Rs 25 lakh to start interaction with the tribe heads and another Rs 25 lakh to apply for the pardon through them. What we are trying immediately is to raise `50 lakh to start the pre-negotiation talks for which we request the help of kind-hearted persons,” A K Moosa Master, one of the key members of the action council, told TNIE.
Priya, who worked as a nurse in Yemen and later started a clinic partnering with Mahdi, was awarded the maximum punishment after she injected him with sedatives in order to get back her passport from his possession. Mahdi died of overdose.