Woman sentenced to stoning death seeks appeal

A Pakistani woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery today said she had been misled by her lawyers into claiming she was raped, and that the baby was actually her husband’s.

Zafran Bibi, 28, was convicted on April 17 by a civil court in Kohat, in Pakistan’s remote northwestern frontier region, for having conceived and delivered a baby while her husband, Niamat Khan, was in jail.

She had argued during the trial that she was raped by her husband’s brother.

But the court rejected her argument because she could not produce four witnesses to the rape, as called for under Islamic law.

In an interview in her cell at Haribur prison, she said her lawyers had told her to say that, promising her she would be acquitted.

Her husband said his wife came to visit him one night during his imprisonment while he was in a prison hospital.

‘‘She spent the night, where this thing happened,’’ he said. ‘‘It is my baby,’’

He did not explain why he had not come to her defence earlier.

Her new lawyer, Fakhar Azam, said an appeal had been filed in federal court and he was hopeful for a ‘‘favourable decision’’.

Early this month, human rights activists asked President Pervez Musharraf to spare Bibi by repealing discriminatory Islamic laws enacted by a former military ruler to appease Islamic hard-liners.

Shamim Iftikhar, the wife of the governor of Northwestern Frontier Province, visited Bibi in jail today with the provincial legal affairs ministers and delivered gifts for her seven-month-old baby and two older children.

She declined to comment on the court’s decision, but said the government would make sure that Bibi had proper legal assistance.