[Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir
Radical Sharia Law Islamist ]
By MOHAMMED SAEED and HAMZA HENDAWI
KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — A
Muslim-by-birth Sudanese woman who married a Christian man was sentenced
to death Thursday after she refused to recant her Christian faith, her
lawyer said.
Meriam Ibrahim,
whose father was Muslim but her mother was an Orthodox Christian from
Ethiopia, was convicted of "apostasy" on Sunday and given four days to
repent and escape death, lawyer Al-Shareef Ali al-Shareef Mohammed said.
The 26 year old, who is eight months pregnant, was sentenced after that grace period expired, Mohammed said.
The
sentence drew immediate condemnation from Amnesty International, which
called it "abhorrent." Mohammed called the conviction rushed and legally
flawed since the judge refused to hear key defense witnesses, as well
as ignored constitutional provisions on freedom of worship and equality
among citizens.
"The fact that a woman could be
sentenced to death for her religious choice, and to flogging for being
married to a man of an allegedly different religion, is abhorrent and
should never be even considered," Amnesty said in a statement, quoting
its Sudan researcher, Manar Idriss.
"It is flagrant breach of international human rights law," she said.
As
in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from
marrying non-Muslims, though Muslim men can marry outside their faith.
By law, children must follow their father's religion.
Sudan
introduced Islamic Shariah laws in the early 1980s, a move that
contributed to the resumption of an insurgency in the mostly animist and
Christian south of Sudan. An earlier round of civil war lasted 17 years
and ended in 1972. The south seceded in 2011 to become the world's
newest nation, South Sudan.
Sudanese
President Omar Bashir, who seized power in a 1989 military coup, is an
Islamist who says his country will implement Islam more strictly now
that the non-Muslim south is gone.
There
have been a number of cases over the years of Sudanese convicted of
apostasy, but they all escaped the gallows by recanting their faith.
Ibrahim is the first to be sentenced to death for apostasy, Mohammed and
Idriss say.
"The
judge has exceeded his mandate when he ruled that Meriam's marriage was
void because her husband was out of her faith," Mohammed told The
Associated Press. "He was thinking more of Islamic Shariah laws than of
the country's laws and its constitution."
He said Ibrahim's Muslim father left her mother when she was a child and her mother raised her as a Christian.
The
court in the capital, Khartoum, also ordered that Ibrahim be given 100
lashes for committing "zena" — an Arabic word for illegitimate sex — for
having sexual relations with her husband, Daniel Wani, a Christian from
southern Sudan who has U.S. citizenship, according to the lawyer and
judicial officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with
regulations.
Ibrahim's case
first came to the attention of authorities in August, when members of
her father's family complained that she was born a Muslim but married a
Christian man.
They claimed
that her birth name was "Afdal" and that she changed it to Meriam.
Mohammed said the document produced by relatives to show she was given a
Muslim name at birth was a fake. Ibrahim refused to answer Judge Abbas
Khalifa when he called her "Afdal" during Thursday's hearing. Meriam is a
common name for Muslims and Christians alike.
"I was never a Muslim. I was raised a Christian from the start," she said.
Authorities
last year charged her with "zena" and she was put on trial, but she
remained free. She was first detained in a Khartoum jail in February and
charged with apostasy after she declared in court that Christianity was
the only religion she knew.
Ibrahim
and Wani married in 2011 and have a son, 18-month-old Martin, who is
with her in jail. The couple runs a farm south of Khartoum.
___
Hendawi reported from Cairo.
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