Mumbai (AsiaNews) - Killed in a capital punishment carried out without much publicity because she was accused of the death of the 4-month-old child in her care. Despite the fact that her family had claimed that her confession of guilt had been extorted from her and that the child had in fact died as a result of a reaction to a vaccination.
This is the chilling fate that befell Shahzadi Khan, a 33-year-old Indian Muslim woman originally from Banda in Uttar Pradesh, who had been on death row in Abu Dhabi for months. The authorities of the United Arab Emirates have notified the Indian embassy that the death sentence was carried out on 15 February; her body is available for the funeral rites, which will take place on 5 March.
‘Shahzadi had had scars on her face since childhood,’ her brother told the Times of India. ’She wanted to have them removed, so when a man called Uzair from Agra told her that if she went to work in the United Arab Emirates it would be possible, she thought she was dreaming.’ She arrived in Abu Dhabi in December 2021 and eight months later she started working as a caregiver for her employer's newborn.
The baby died on 7 December 2022, after receiving routine vaccinations. Despite the hospital's request for an autopsy, the parents refused and signed a waiver. Then, in February 2023, a video allegedly showed Shahzadi confessing to the murder of the child; however, she always claimed that the confession had been extracted from her under torture by her employer.
Arrested on 10 February 2023, she was sentenced to death on 31 July 2023, with an appeal then rejected and the sentence confirmed on 28 February 2024.
Her father Shabbir Khan accused the Indian embassy of not offering his daughter any help, claiming that the lawyer himself had pressured her into making a confession. He made several requests for clemency to the Emirates authorities, without receiving any response.
On 14 February he had received a phone call from Shahzadi, who told him of her imminent execution. Seeking clarity, he formally approached the Indian Foreign Ministry on 20 February, but again received no updates.
After the execution, his father called it an injustice, claiming that the family had been denied support from the Indian government. Their lawyer, Ali Mohammad, described it as an ‘extrajudicial killing disguised as a judicial execution’.
