SHARI’A LAW AT WORK IN YEMEN:

EUROPEAN leaders are making desperate pleas to spare the life of a 21-year-old mother who is expected to face a firing squad in Yemen on Monday. The lawyer for Amina Ali Abduladif will visit her in prison today to break the news that her execution is imminent.

Mrs Abduladif was spared two years ago when she was facing her executioners and told them she was pregnant after being raped by a prison guard. But her lawyer, Shada Nasir, told The Times: “Now that her son has reached his second birthday the law here says the death sentence should be carried out.

“I don’t know how I am going to tell her.”

Mrs Nasir said the authorities had also told her to remove the boy from the Sanaa women’s prison as his mother was due to be taken back to her home village to face execution.

International pressure is mounting on Yemen to halt what Amnesty International has called “a barbaric sentence”. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: “We are well aware of this case and the EU is urgently discussing the matter with a number of ministers in Yemen.”

Mrs Abduladif was convicted of murdering her husband when she was 16 and the mother of two daughters. There was no forensic science or other evidence and prosecutors in her home town, Mahaweet, relied on her confession which she says was tortured out of her.

Until now she has refused to identify the guard who raped her for fear of reprisals.

(Via Little Green Footballs)