I trust god, hoping for a miracle: Mother of Indian nurse on death row in Yemen

medium116967757The year 2024 could not have ended on a more dismal note for Prema Kumari, a resident of Palakkad district in Kerala, who had to undertake a journey to Yemen, a strife-torn country run over by Houthi rebels.Prema, who has spent eight months in the capital city of Sana’a, is not sure what 2025 will bring. She was hoping to bring her daughter, Nimisha Priya, back from jail, but instead learnt on December 30 that President of Yemen (Sana’a) Mahdi Al Mashat had signed off on her death sentence. The signature was the last step of a long, legal journey.Nimisha, a nurse by training, had travelled to Yemen in the hope of an improved life but ended up as a convict, found guilty of killing a Yemeni national in 2017.Nimisha’s life has been hanging by a slender thread since November 2023 when she was sentenced to death by Yemen’s supreme judicial council.The 34-year-old Nimisha has been on death row for murdering a local man, Talal Abdo Mahdi, with whom she partnered to start a clinic.Since November 2023, Nimisha and her family have been living with a sliver of hope. Her life can be saved if Mahdi’s family accepts ‘diyah’ or blood money and grants her a pardon in return. Blood money is negotiated under Sharia laws which allow compensation.Remember the film Dor?, I’d asked in a previous column on Nimisha. The much-acclaimed movie was based on a similar, true-life story. In Dor, Gul Panag had set off on a journey to meet the wife of the man her husband was accused of killing.In Nimisha’s case, her mother secured a court order to travel to a war-torn country into which Indians are no longer allowed. The government gave her a waiver after she submitted an affidavit to the ministry of external affairs (MEA), absolving them of any responsibility to go to out-of-bounds Yemen.When Prema first met her daughter in Sana’a jail, the tears wouldn’t stop flowing. A mother was meeting her daughter after a gap of seven years, and the jail authorities opened a room for them and even ordered food.“The meeting lasted five hours,” Subhash Chandran, lawyer and migrant rights activist, told TOI Plus. He had approached the court on Prema’s behalf to seek permission for her to travel to Yemen. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/Tpj4GSX8YWk?si=NJL13NaROF55z8baWhen Nimisha left Kerala for Yemen in 2009 as a 19-year-old, she had promised her mother that she would help lift the family out of poverty. She first worked at a government-run hospital and then at various clinics, where she met Mahdi. She wanted to fulfil the promise she had made to her mother.There was no sign of any civil strife when she first went to Yemen. Nimisha visited India in 2011 and married Tomy Thomas. The newly-weds returned to Yemen together and Thomas worked as a technician. The couple had a daughter in 2012. But Thomas returned to Kochi with their child because he wasn’t earning enough.This is when Nimisha decided on starting a clinic and took her plans to Mahdi. By law, she could only realise her dream of alleviating her family from poverty by partnering with a local person.In 2015, when Nimisha came home to Kerala for her daughter’s baptism ceremony, Mahdi even accompanied her for a holiday. On their return, his behaviour changed and he took away her passport. According to the petition in the Delhi high court, “he physically tortured her and took away all the revenue collection from the clinic”.The petition also says that he threatened her with a gun and kept her passport to prevent her from leaving Yemen. Nimisha filed a police complaint against Mahdi but she was the one “locked up” for a few days.She was convicted for murder in July 2017. It was alleged that she injected Mahdi with sedatives in a desperate attempt to retrieve her passport, but he died due to an overdose. According to the chargesheet, Nimisha cut his body into pieces.When Prema went to Sana’a, she knew what she would do. She would simply seek forgiveness in the name of her daughter and granddaughter aged 12.The road to forgiveness, however, has not been easy. The Indian government appointed a lawyer to help Nimisha and money was crowdsourced through an organisation called the Save Nimisha Priya International Action Council.Samuel Jerome, an aviation consultant and an important member of the Indian diaspora in Yemen, set about the difficult task of seeking forgiveness from Mahdi’s family, but their efforts faced several setbacks.The lawyer fixed a pre-negotiation fee of $40,000, suggesting that it could be paid in two instalments. Both instalments were routed through the MEA, but according to Jerome — with whom Prema is staying in Sana’a — the second instalment was unduly delayed. It reached only a few days before the Yemeni president signed off on the death sentence. Was precious time lost?“We were climbing a mountain and trying to gain the trust of Mahdi’s family. The negotiations were going well. We kept saying, ‘Please, please, please forgive Nimisha’, but then the trust was lost because the second instalment didn’t come, despite repeated reminders, till a few days before the execution order was signed,” Jerome told TOI Plus in a video interview from Yemen.A death warrant now stares Nimisha in the face. The warrant is now with the public prosecutor’s office, and Mahdi’s family will be asked whether they give their consent for execution or not. 116960802Will Mahdi’s family consent to Nimisha’s execution or will they pardon her and accept the blood money? According to Jerome, who is in touch with the lawyer as well as with Indian embassy officials, the question will be answered within a few weeks. That’s usually how long it takes once the president puts his signature on the execution order.“We are racing against time,” he said, indicating, however, that he was still hoping for a positive development.There is still a window of opportunity. One more meeting between Mahdi’s family and Nimisha’s lawyers and embassy officials took place on January 1, three days after the president signed the execution order.“The process is complex,” explained Jerome, who is also part of the negotiations. Nimisha has to be forgiven not just by Mahdi’s family but also from his tribe. That’s how society works in Yemen. Mahdi is the victim and Nimisha a murder convict.The MEA, on its part, is working to help Nimisha. “We are aware of the sentencing of Ms. Nimisha Priya in Yemen. We understand that the family is exploring relevant options,” a statement said.Efforts to seek forgiveness have intensified. That is the only ‘relevant option’ that remains. The MEA, however, is constrained by the fact that it has no diplomatic presence in Yemen. It is working through local staffers based in its embassy in Sanaa and through senior diplomats in its mission in Riyadh.Migrant rights activist Chandran believes Nimisha was denied justice and represented through a lawyer who only spoke Arabic. “She did not know what documents she was signing. What she underwent after her passport was confiscated is a form of slavery,” he asserts, but the time for those arguments has now passed. The clock is ticking.More meetings are in the offing and if Mahdi’s family (also represented by senior members of the tribe) agrees to deny consent for Nimisha’s execution, the negotiators will then have to settle the amount to be paid as blood money. The figure could be in crores of rupees.The Indian nurse’s life hangs by a thread. Only a pardon from Mahdi’s family can help save her life.I managed to speak to Prema with Jerome’s help. He translated what she said in Malayalam. I could hear her choking on words as she spoke. “I believe in god. I hope he will deliver a miracle,” she said.She knows her imprisoned daughter is caught between life and death. As a mother, so is she. She spends each day praying.Read more from the author here.