Iran says 'will do whatever possible' in Indian-origin nurse Nimisha Priya case
Iran has assured assistance to save the life of Indian-origin nurse Nimisha Priya (37) who has been a sentenced to death in Yemen.
Yemen President Rashad al-Alimi had on Monday last approved the death sentence of Nimisha Priya, who was convicted of murdering a Yemeni citizen Talal Abdo Mahdi. The sentence will be executed in a month’s time, reports said.
Following this, the Ministry of External Affairs said the Centre is extending all possible help in the matter.
Meanwhile, Iran has assured that it will "take up" the case which is being tried in Sanaa, the administrative capital of Yemen. Sanaa is under the control of the Iran-aligned Houthi militants.
According to a report, the declaration of assistance by an highly placed Iranian official might help India in saving the life of the nurse.
"We will take up this issue regarding this nurse. We will do whatever we can," a senior Iranian official was quoted as saying by The Hindu while he was meeting representatives of media organisations in the Iranian embassy in New Delhi on Thursday.
The approval of the death sentence for the nurse has come as a shocker for her family, particularly, for her mother Prema Kumari, 57, who has been striving hard for the past many years to save her daughter.
It was to help her daily wage labourer parents that Nimisha Priya, a nurse from Kollengode in Palakkad district of Kerala, left for Yemen in 2008. She worked in a few hospitals in the country and had planned to start her own clinic. In 2017, she had a fallout with her local partner Talal Abdo Mahdi. Her family said she had opposed his alleged attempts to embezzle funds.
In a bid to reclaim her passport confiscated by the Yemeni national, she allegedly injected him with sedatives. However, an overdose of the sedative resulted in his death.
She was arrested while attempting to flee Yemen and was convicted in 2018. She was sentenced to death by a trial court in Sanaa in 2020. Yemen’s Supreme Judicial Council had dismissed her appeal in November 2023 while keeping the option of paying blood money open.
Nimisha’s family had hoped that they would be able to save her after convincing the victim’s family to accept the blood money.
Tomy Thomas, Nimisha’s husband, had returned from Yemen along with their 11-year-old daughter following the civil war in the country in 2014.
(With inputs from ENS)