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| Meriam Ibrahim and husband |
A Sudanese woman sentenced to hang for allegedly abandoning the Muslim faith will be freed within days, foreign ministry officials said Saturday.
She will likely be "freed within days", a foreign ministry source told AFP.
Abdullahi Alzareg, an undersecretary at Sudan's foreign ministry, told the BBC that his country was committed to upholding religious freedom and would protect the accused.
Meriam Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim but who was raised by her Christian mother, was
convicted on May 11 of apostasy for marrying a Christian and sentenced to hang for abandoning the Muslim faith.
Ibrahim, 27, was eight months pregnant at the time. She gave birth to Maya, a baby girl, on Tuesday while chained in the hospital wing of Omdurman Women’s Prison.
Her husband has said that Ibrahim identifies as a Christian and was never Muslim, and therefore could not have abandoned the faith.
Under
sharia law, which has has been in force in Sudan since 1983, conversions are punishable by death.
The court also ordered her Christian marriage to be annulled and sentenced her to 100 lashes for adultery.
Sex outside a "lawful relationship" is regarded as adultery under Sudanese law.
News of her impending release came as British Prime Minister David Cameron and former PM Tony Blair urged Sudan's government to commute the death sentence.
Speaking to "The Times" newspaper on Saturday, Cameron said the treatment of Ibrahim "is barbaric and has no place in today's world".
Blair described the case as a "brutal and sickening distortion of faith".
Western embassies and human right activists had condemned what they said were human rights abuses and called on the Sudanese Islamist-led government to respect freedom of faith.
"We call upon the government of Sudan to respect the right to freedom of religion, including one's right to change one's faith or beliefs," the embassies of the United States, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands said in a joint statement.
