News Digest

Indonesian domestic worker beheaded for murder in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia on Tuesday beheaded an Indonesian domestic worker who knifed to death a Saudi woman described in press reports as her employer. Amnesty International said the sentence against Siti Zainab was carried out despite suspicions she was mentally ill. The interior ministry said Zainab was executed after being convicted of stabbing and beating Saudi woman Noura al-Morobei to death. Authorities carried out the sentence on Tuesday in the Muslim holy city of Medina, the ministry said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.

Imposing the death penalty and executing someone with a suspected mental illness smacks of a basic lack of humanity.

Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director

It cited sources in Indonesia as saying Zainab admitted to stabbing her employer 18 times because of alleged mistreatment. Indonesia four years ago announced a moratorium on sending migrant workers to the kingdom, but the Saudi newspaper Arab News reported in January that negotiations between the two countries over the recruitment of domestics had resumed. Rights groups regularly denounce abuse and even torture of impoverished women from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Nepal who work as maids in Gulf countries.

She had no legal representation at any stage and did not have access to a consular representative during the police interrogation when she had made her ‘confession’

Amnesty