Kerala nurse death row: Supreme Court to hear plea seeking intervention to save Nimisha Priya

Nimisha Priya

The Supreme Court is set to take up a plea on Monday seeking the Indian government use diplomatic channels to Nimisha Priya, a nurse from Kerala facing execution in Yemen for alleged murder. The hearing comes just two days before her scheduled execution on Tuesday, July 16.

The gravity of charges against Indian nurse Nimisha Priya, who has been sentenced to death by a Yemeni court after being convicted of murdering a citizen of the country, has made it difficult for the efforts to seek relief for her to succeed.

According to Yemeni court documents, Nimisha Priya in July 2017 allegedly drugged and murdered her local business partner, Talal Abdo Mehdi and, with the help of another nurse, chopped his body and disposed of the dismembered parts in an underground tank.

The plea filed in Supreme Court seeks to explore the option of paying 'blood money' to the victim's family in order to save Nimisha Priya from execution. The provision is permissible under Sharia law in Yemen, the plea argues.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta will likely hear the matter, that was listed for urgent hearing on July 10.

Congress leader K C Venugopal on Saturday sought the intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in saving Kerala-born Nimisha Priya from execution in Yemen.

Advocate Subhash Chandran KR submitted the plea, which argues that the payment of blood money would influence the victim's family to pardon the Kerala nurse. Nimisha Priya's family has reportedly offered $1 million ( ₹8.6 crore) as 'blood money' to the victim's family in hopes of saving her

Nimisha Priya is a 38-year-old nurse from Kerala's Palakkad district. She went to Yemen for work in 2011, but is currently locked up in a prison in the capital city Sana’a. She went to Yemen with her family, but her husband and daughter returned to India three years later in 2014 due to civil unrest in Yemen.