A panel of three judges in Makkah sentenced a woman to death Tuesday for torturing her seven-year-old stepdaughter to death five months ago and sentenced the woman's husband, the girl's father, to 15 years in prison. During the six-hour-long hearing, the general prosecutor presented the court with the confessions of the stepmother and the biological father of Kalthoum, who come from Myanmar. The child's mother and her husband sought a more severe punishment for the child's father. Kalthoum suffered from despicable acts of torture at the hand of her stepmother who repeatedly beat and burned her and inserted a thick stick into her private parts on numerous occasions, according to the Commission of Investigation and Prosecution (CIP). The father was said to have known about the abuse of his child by his second wife, but did nothing about it. In fact, he encouraged his wife to “discipline” the girl even more, the investigation revealed. When the child died, the father took her to the emergency room, claiming that her stepmother only tried to “discipline” her when she urinated in her pants. In his report to the hospital, the father said, that his child slipped on the stairs when she was running away from her stepmother, which caused her to fall and sustain injury marks and black spots all over her body. In the early police investigation, the stepmother said that the child was like one of her own children. When the incident happened, there was nobody around but a neighbor who took her to hospital, the stepmother initially told the police. But the police did not accept this story and launched a massive investigation into the case after which the couple broke down and confessed. The neighbor who took her to hospital was her father, the stepmother admitted. The father said that he approved of his second wife torturing his child in order to discipline her.
