‘My sister should die if she stays a Christian’

The brother of a Sudanese woman sentenced to death for refusing to recant her Christian faith after allegedly converting from Islam has said she should she be killed because his family are "Muslim people."

Samani Al Hadi said he turned his sister Meriam Ibrahim over to authorities and she “should be executed” if she does not recant her Christianity.

“It’s one of two: if she repents and returns to our Islamic faith and to the embrace of our family then we are her family and she is ours,” he said.

“But if she refuses she should be executed,” he told CNN, fuelling widespread belief that she was denounced as part of a family feud.

Ibrahim has appealed against the sentence, her lawyer said. The appeal demands the release of Meriam, saying the court that tried her committed “procedural errors”, according to her lawyer Eman Abdul-Rahim.

Ms Ibrahim was sentenced to death for apostasy last month by a Khartoum court for allegedly converting to Christianity from Islam. She maintains that her Muslim father left when she was young and that she was raised a Christian by her Ethiopian mother, who is an Orthodox Christian.

Ms Ibrahim married a Christian man from southern Sudan in a church ceremony in 2011. As in many Islamic nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, although Muslim men can marry outside their faith.

She has a son, 18-month-old Martin, who is living with her in jail, where she gave birth to a second child last week.

Her husband told how his wife had been forced to give birth in a clinic in the prison, rather than in hospital, and with her legs still shackled.

By law, children must follow their father’s religion.

Amnesty International condemned the sentence, calling it “abhorrent”, and the US State Department said it was “deeply disturbed” by the case.

Sudan introduced Islamic shariah law in the early 1980s under the rule of autocrat Jaafar Nimeiri, a move that contributed to the resumption of an insurgency in the mostly animist and Christian south of Sudan.

The south seceded in 2011 to become the world’s newest nation, South Sudan.

Sudanese president Omar Bashir, an Islamist who seized power in a 1989 military coup, has said his country will implement Islam more strictly now the non-Muslim south is gone.

But President al-Bashir, who returned to work this week after an operation on his knee, was said to be considering issuing a presidential pardon following advice from representative from the ministry of foreign affairs that the case was damaging Sudan’s reputation.