Reports: Indians on death row in Emirates reject settlement

Fri, 31 Dec 2010

New Delhi - Indian nationals on death row in the United Arab Emirates have rejected a blood-money settlement that would see them freed, news reports said Friday.

Seventeen Indians were sentenced to death in March for killing a Pakistani man in 2009 after a dispute over an illegal liquor business.

Lawyers For Human Rights International, an Indian non-governmental organization pursuing the case, told the IANS news agency that family members of the victim had told the court that they were ready to accept compensation, including blood money, but the Indians refused, saying they were innocent.

"Blood money is given in those cases where conviction has been proved through evidence, but in this case, they are innocent and police have not found any evidence against them," Navkiran Singh, a representative for the group, based in the northern state of Punjab, told the IANS.

"We want to bring them back clean, but once we pay the blood money, it will prove them automatically guilty," Singh said. "Besides these 17 men, there are many other innocent Indian youths lodged in UAE jails, and we cannot pay blood money for all of them."

Bindu Chettur, a lawyer representing the defendants, told the PTI news agency that the prosecution had failed to bring evidence before the court. A key witness had retracted his statement of having seen the Indians commit the crime, the Times Now news channel reported.

A sharia court, which applies Islamic law, had earlier sentenced the 17 men for the murder, which took place in Sharjah, an emirate north of Dubai, in January 2009.

It was the highest number of death sentences handed down at one time in the Emirates, according to media reports at the time. The convicted men were aged 17 to 30.

The court said the violence was a result of a turf war between groups selling illegal alcohol in and around labor camps in Sharjah.

Sharjah has the toughest restrictions on the sale of alcohol of all the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/360240,row-emirates-reject-settlement.html.