A court in Sharjah has upheld the death sentence against a United Arab Emirates woman for stabbing her husband to death seven years ago, Gulf News daily reported yesterday.

The woman's lover and two of his friends have also been given the death sentence for their roles in the murder of the woman's husband, the report said.

"The Emirati woman will become the first female convict to be executed in the United Arab Emirates," a court official told the Dubai-based paper.

The report identified the woman only as Khawla, whom it said was a 17-year-old newly-wed at the time of the murder. It said she had asked her husband, who was also her cousin, to accompany her to the beach in Sharjah, one of seven emirates in the UAE federation. Her lover came to the place accompanied by his friends Mukhtar, an Emirati, and Abdullah Hussain from Bangladesh, also both 17 at the time. The three men attacked the husband, an Emirati policeman in his twenties, holding him down while his wife stabbed him several times, the paper said.

"The three men then ran away leaving the victim bleeding for more than an hour. The woman then contacted police claiming that unidentified robbers had attacked him."

Khawla later admitted that she had killed her husband so she would be free to marry her lover, and police arrested the three accomplices.

The husband's parents refused to pardon the accused and sought Qisas (capital punishment in Arabic) for them.

"The victim's mother, who passed away after the murder of her son, asked her children while she was on her death bed not to pardon the killers after her death," the paper said.

The Sharia court of first instance found all the accused guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced them to death, with the Sharjah Appeal Court upholding the sentence for murder, according to a judicial source.