Maid torturer in Saudi was born in Cairo: report

A widow who has been arrested for severely torturing her Indonesian housemaid in Saudi Arabia was born in Cairo and has seven children, the Saudi Arabic language newspaper Okaz reported on Sunday.

The paper also said the 23-year-old maid was moved out of the intensive care unit at King Fahd Hospital in the central town of Madina after undergoing a surgery on her badly damaged scalp.

“The widow has undergone psychiatric tests and is still in confinement with no visitors allowed…Okaz has learned that the woman was born in Cairo and has one son and six daughters aged between 19 and 24 years,” the paper said, without making clear if the woman is Saudi or Egyptian.

It said the maid, Sumiati Salan Mustapa would also undergo several plastic surgeries on the head and body after her employer used a hot iron to torture her, claiming she wanted to treat her mental illness.

Doctors had said the maid was suffering from burns on her body, cuts in her scalp and upper lip, a fractured pelvis and many wounds.

According to the papers, the 53-year-old widow confessed to the crime after her son told police during interrogation that his mother tortured the maid.

The unnamed widow has remained in detention pending trial and a local human rights group has said it would demand severe punishment of the employer. “Mustapa has left the intensive care unit and her condition has started to stabilise,” Okaz quoted a doctor as saying.

On Saturday, the Saudi Ministry of Labour said it sympathised with Mustapa but said the torturing of her “is an individual act that should not be generalised.”

It said the Gulf kingdom guarantees all rights of its nearly 670,000 expatriate housemaids, adding that there are individual offences from time to time.
 

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