A Sudanese doctor who is facing execution in Sudan for marrying a Christian gave birth to a baby girl in prison today. Meriam Ibrahim, who has spent the past four months in jail, gave birth five days prematurely.
The baby was born in the hospital wing at Omdurman Federal Women’s Prison in North Khartoum and is said to be healthy.
Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, her lawyer Mohaned Mustafa Elnour said:
'This is some good news in what has been a terrible ordeal for Meriam. 'I am planning to visit her with her husband Daniel later today. I think they are going to call the baby Maya.’
Meriam, 27, was sentenced to death by hanging earlier this month after being found guilty of converting from Islam to Christianity and marrying a Christian man, U.S. citizen Daniel Wani, who lives in Manchester, New Hampshire.
She will receive 100 lashes before she is executed - sometime in the next two years. Before the birth, Meriam made the defiant claim that she would rather die than give up her faith.In a heart-wrenching conversation with her husband during a rare prison visit, Meriam told him: 'If they want to execute me then they should go ahead and do it because I’m not going to change my faith.’ An Islamic Sharia judge said she could be spared the death penalty if she publicly renounced her faith and becomes a Muslim once more. Meriam insists she has always been a Christian and told her husband she could not 'pretend to be a Muslim' just to spare her life.
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| Meriam's Husband Daniel seeing their son for the first time after his wife arrest |
Daniel Wani, a 27 years old biochemist reveals that he was in Khartoum trying to arrange for Meriam and their 20-month-old son Martin to live with him in the US when his wife was arrested in September. She was three weeks pregnant with their second child. She has been held since February in Omdurman Federal Women’s Prison, North Khartoum, with Martin.
The authorities will not release Martin into the care of his father because they claim he is a Muslim too. He is not allow to spend time with them because the Sudanese officials do not recognise them as his wife and son.
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| Meriam's son Martin |
Daniel, who is wheelchair-bound because he suffers from muscular dystrophy, cuts a forlorn figure as he wheels himself around his empty house. Daniel keeps himself busy by studying the regular barrage of paperwork that his legal team send him. Like many in Sudan, both Daniel and his wife’s childhood were blighted by civil war. Daniel managed to escape the brutal conflict in 1998 when he travelled to America with his brother Gabriel.
The biochemist returned to Sudan to marry Meriam at a Christian service in a chapel which was attended by around 500 people in December 2011.
Most who were at the wedding ceremony could vouch for the pair being committed Christians, defence lawyers say. But witnesses who were willing to give evidence on her behalf were barred from testifying because they were Christian.
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| Daniel with his son and wife's lawyer |
She even produced a marriage certificate identifying herself as a Christian. Despite this, the judge determined that because her father was a Muslim, even though he abandoned the family while they were living in a refugee camp in the South East of Sudan when she was six, she too was a Muslim who had broken the law by leaving Islam. But her mother, who is now dead, brought her up as Christian.
Her mother was born in Ethiopia to Christian parents, but fled to Sudan because of famine, and chose to raise her daughter in the same religion.
Meriam was arrested in mid-September, three weeks after her second child was conceived. At first the couple dismissed the allegations against them as trivial, but when the case grew more serious Daniel went to the American Embassy in Khartoum for help but the embassy could not help him because Meriam wasn't America citizen.
The Sharia court has postponed her sentence, to give her time to recover from childbirth and to wean the new baby.
Her lawyer, Mohaned Mustafa Elnour, a Muslim, has received death threats for defending her but has already lodged an appeal. If he does not succeed at the Appeal Court, he will take the case to Sudan’s Supreme Court.A petition calling for her release had last week reached more than 650,000.
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