An Indian nurse fought one of two armed burglars in her house early Sunday morning and was left with a deep knife wound in her right middle finger that doctors said would never function normally again. Shoshamma Daniel, 34, was sound asleep when two burglars broke into her house in Al-Qudh District. At around 3 A.M. she was stirred awake by sounds of things being moved about in her bedroom. Shoshamma had gone to bed thinking that she would be alone in the house since her husband had a night shift to work. Awakened by the sounds, she opened her eyes and saw a stranger in her room dimly lit by a night lamp. She screamed. The burglar attacked her with a knife. Shoshamma fought back, fiercely trying to stop the man, in his twenties, from trying to stab her and wrench free the gold chain from around her neck. For 10 minutes they fought. At one point she got hold of the sharp edge of the knife with her right hand and it cut through her middle finger, almost all the way. But Shoshamma said she held on despite the pain, injuring two other fingers, but the burglar managed to break her chain free. Her husband, Daniel, a clerk who had come home earlier than expected and gone to sleep on the sofa-bed in the adjacent room, without his wife's knowledge, was meanwhile locked in another fight with another man in his 20s who tried to stop him from entering his wife's bedroom. Daniel fought hard but a hit on his head from a sharp screwdriver gave the burglars the chance to escape. They got away but Daniel immediately called the police and within 10 minutes four police patrol vans arrived and scoured the neighborhood for the culprits. The burglars got away with SR3,500 in cash, a 3.7-gram gold necklace, a mobile phone and a watch, said Shakieb Kolakadan, a Indian social worker. Kolakadan had rushed to the house on receiving word of the robbery. He assisted Shoshamma and Daniel in filing an FIR with Diera Police Station and related to Saudi Gazette the details of the complaint made. At the station, Shoshamma was shown an album of around 3,000 photographs of suspects for identification. Shoshamma did not find the two burglars in the photos but she told Kolakadan their faces were etched in her mind. The memory is an unfortunate ending for Shoshamma and Daniel who, after spending three years in Riyadh, were preparing to migrate next month to Britain, where their two children, now in India, would join them. Al-Qodh District is a sparsely populated residential area and by the time Shoshamma's neighbors rushed over on hearing her screams, the burglars had escaped. Kolakadan said it was puzzling how the burglars managed to break into the house. Their two-storey building has a main steel door, which is always kept closed – there are only two apartments in the building and Daniel's brother lives in the ground floor apartment. But the building has no watchman. So it's most likely that the thugs managed to slip into the building sometime during the day and hid till late into the night before breaking open the wooden door into the Daniel flat, Kolakadan said. They might have also known that Daniel was doing a night shift on Sunday, he said. The burglary has so traumatized Daniel and Shoshamma – has already resigned from her job in preparation to migrate to the UK – that they were talking about moving to another locality to spend their last few day in Saudi Arabia, Kolakadan said. Shoshamma underwent surgery to restore the badly slashed tendon of her middle finger, which the doctors say would not ever function normally again. “Shoshamma is so shaken that she does not want to recall anymore any moment of the burglary,” said Kolakadan. This was not the first time that an Indian woman was attacked by the robbers in the capital city. According to reports, an Indian woman walking along with her husband in Hai Al-Wazarat District was recently attacked by thugs who snatched away her purse containing jewelry, a mobile phone, cash and documents as they sped by in a car. The force of the attack flung the woman to the ground, injuring her arm and neck. __
