Ahmad Al-Ansari Saudi Gazette YANBU — The prosecution called for the death penalty for a housemaid who was accused of decapitating a four-year-old girl with a cleaver in Yanbu last September. Tala Al-Shehri's father said he would never forgive the housemaid for what she did to his daughter. He also said justice should be served, criticizing the slow proceedings of the case. He added he and his family would never forget that black Wednesday in September when they saw their little girl's headless corpse lying in a pool of blood. Tala's mother, a teacher, fainted and was admitted to hospital while Tala's sisters were treated for shock. Tala's relatives said they could not understand the housemaid's horrific action for they had always treated her well. The Indonesian Embassy in Riyadh appointed three Saudi lawyers last October to defend the maid, who is in prison. Ibrahim Al-Mihayani of the Human Rights Commission in Yanbu said a team from the rights watchdog visited the maid in prison. “The team found that the woman seemed unperturbed by her heinous action, and she tried to win the visitors' sympathy,” Al-Mihayani said. “She said she does not have any remorse for what she did. She cited messages from Tala's sisters that said she was to be deported as the reason for committing the crime,” he said. Dr. Khalid Al-Oufi, consultant psychiatrist and medical director of Al-Amal Hospital in Jeddah, described her as a mentally-troubled person who suffers from internal conflicts and a desire to kill with vengeance and without any remorse. “Her desire reflects nothing but sadism,” he added. Al-Oufi urged psychologists and social and family counselors to conduct extensive studies into why some housemaids commit these horrific crimes. Recently there has been an increase in the number of incidence in which maids were found to have abused wards of families they worked for. The most celebrated case was that of the Sri Lankan housemaid, who was executed in January for murdering her employer's baby after exhausting all appeals and mercy petitions. Rizana Nafeek smothered the infant to death after an argument with the child's mother, her employer. She was executed in Dawadmi near Riyadh. In another case, a Dammam court ruled out the death penalty for an Indonesian maid accused of poisoning Mishari, a four-month-old infant, to death. The child's parents said they would appeal the verdict. The verdict was issued by a three-judge panel after a protracted trial that involved 43 court sessions over a period of three years. The prosecutor, the defendant, her lawyer, two members of the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) and translators were present in the court room when the verdict was read out. The maid had admitted in court to the ghastly deed of adding rat poison to the infant's milk, but she retracted the statement saying she had confessed under duress. However, she told the court at a later hearing that she had confessed of her own accord and was guilty of the crime.
