KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — A Christian woman sentenced to
death in Sudan and later freed has been detained at an airport while
trying to leave the country Tuesday, her lawyer said.
Lawyer Eman
Abdul-Rahim told The Associated Press that the 27-year-old Meriam
Ibrahim was held along with two children and her husband at the
international airport in Khartoum, the country’s capital. Abdul-Rahim
did not elaborate and security officials did not respond to requests for
comment.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told
reporters in Washington that the Sudanese government had informed
American officials at the embassy in Khartoum that Ibrahim and her
family were "temporarily detained" over issues relating their travel
documents.
Harf said the Sudanese have assured the U.S. that the
family is not under arrest and that they are safe. She said U.S.
officials are continuing to work on getting them out of the country.
Ibrahim,
whose father was Muslim but who was raised by her Christian mother, was
convicted of apostasy for marrying a Christian. Sudan’s penal code
forbids Muslims from converting to other religions, a crime punishable
by death.
Ibrahim married a Christian man from southern Sudan in a
church ceremony in 2011. As in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in
Sudan are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, though Muslim men can
marry outside their faith. By law, children must follow their father’s
religion.
The sentence drew international condemnation, with
Amnesty International calling it "abhorrent." The U.S. State Department
said it was "deeply disturbed" by the sentence and called on the
Sudanese government to respect religious freedoms.
On Monday, Sudan’s Court of Cassation threw out Ibrahim’s death sentence and freed her after a
presentation by her legal team.
Sudan
introduced Islamic Shariah law in the early 1980s under the rule of
autocrat Jaafar Nimeiri, contributing 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 that
the non-Muslim south is gone.
A number of Sudanese have been
convicted of apostasy in recent years, but they all escaped execution by
recanting their new faith.
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Associated Press writer Matt Lee in Washington contributed to this report.