Residents of a village in Telangana's Nizamabad district are taking to crowdfunding to save one of their own, who is on death row in the UAE.
Makuri Shankar (48) was sentenced to death in October 2009 for allegedly murdering a Rajasthan man, reports Sushil Rao for The Times of India. He is presently lodged at a jail in Fujairah.
Shankar left his village of Mendora in 2005 to earn a better future for himself and his family. He was, however, convicted of murder in 2009 after a man fell from the sixth floor of an under-construction building, where he was working as a supervisor.
But his involvement in the death is contested by persons helping Shankar.
“Shankar was in his room at that time and is in no way responsible for the man's death. The police registered a murder case against Shankar and jailed him,” TOI quoted a local politician and social worker as saying.
Initially, the family of the Rajasthan man claimed Rs 20 lakh as blood money and later agreed to accept Rs 6.5 lakh as Shankar came from a poor family.
“The case came up once before a higher court on Tuesday and Shankar was given a final chance of settling the matter,” he told TOI.
A similar incident took place in 2013, where a man from Kerala’s Kottayam district was convicted of murdering a fellow Kerala man in Abu Dhabi. Residents of Attingal and other nearby villages pooled in to help the family collect blood money, as ordered by an Abu Dhabi court.
In that incident, the convict’s family also claimed that the man was innocent.
On that occasion, the Kerala government had reportedly intervened and delayed the execution.
Blood money
‘Blood money’ in the UAE is referred to as “money paid as compensation to the next of kin of an unintentional homicide victim. This type of restitution is paid to the heirs of the deceased and accordingly it constitutes part of the inheritance process”
The National, a UAE publication reports that the standard blood money for death is 200, 000 dirhams while the same for injured body parts can vary depending on the extent of the damage or percentage of disability.