Sudan says Death Row mother will be released

SUDAN appeared to be bowing to international pressure last night to free a woman sentenced to death for apostasy. A foreign ministry spokesman said that Meriam Ibrahim would be released and not face further charges.

But lawyers for 27-year-old Ms Ibrahim expressed scepticism that she would be freed so quickly.

“It’s a statement to silence the international media,” said Elshareef Ali Mohammed. “This is what the government does. We will not believe that she is being freed until she walks out of the prison.

“If they were to release her, the announcement would come from the appeal court, and not from the ministry of foreign affairs. But at least it shows our campaign to free Meriam is rattling them. We must keep up the pressure.”

The government in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, has come under increasing pressure to free Ibrahim since she was sentenced on May 15 to hang for refusing to recant her Christianity. In Sudan, abandoning Islam is a crime punishable by death.

The mother of two, whose husband Daniel Wani has dual American-Sudanese citizenship, insists that she was raised as a Christian. She says her Muslim father abandoned the family when she was a child.

Mark Simmonds, the Foreign Office’s Africa minister, said yesterday that Britain was “putting intense pressure on the Sudanese government” to ensure her release.

On Tuesday, Ibrahim gave birth in prison to a daughter, Maya — her second child — which poured fuel on the fire of criticism.

Wani provoked an outcry when he told The Daily Telegraph that his wife had been forced to give birth in a clinic in the prison, rather than in hospital, and with her legs still shackled. — The Sunday Telegraph