Mohammed Rasooldeen, Arab News
 
RIYADH, 8 December 2007 — The appeal hearing in the case of a Sri Lankan maid, who was sentenced to death after a four-month-old infant in her care died, is set to take place today before a three-judge panel in a court in Dawadmi.

“There is every possibility of Rizana (Nafeek) being acquitted and for her to be free from this case once and for all,” Hussain Bhaila, Sri Lanka’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, told Arab News.

The Dawadmi court has been ordered by the Court of Cassation (the Saudi appeals court) to review its verdict. Nafeek claims that the newborn choked while she was bottle-feeding him; the parents contend that she murdered the child in her third week on the job.

Nafeek was convicted of murdering the infant on June 16. An appeal was filed against the judgment on July 15, a day before the deadline set out by the court, after which she would have lost the opportunity to appeal.

The Sri Lankan Embassy in Riyadh is expected to send a team of officials including an interpreter to look after Nafeek’s interests in court. Nafeek allegedly confessed to her crime shortly after her arrest, but she has since retracted this confession, which she said was the result of a misunderstanding related to the language barrier and her duress.

Khateb Al-Shammary, a law firm based in Riyadh, filed the appeal after the intervention by the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC).

Speaking to Arab News, AHRC Executive Director Basil Fernando praised the efforts made by the Saudi Human Rights Commission to save Nafeek.

“Officials from the Saudi commission have met the relatives of the infant regarding the issue,” he said in an interview with Arab News in October.

During Ramadan, Nafeek’s lawyers met the tribal leaders in Dawadmi in an attempt to negotiate with members of the victim’s family. The lawyers explained Nafeek’s situation to the leaders and told them she should be pardoned on humanitarian grounds.

A women’s social service group headed by Kifaya Iftikhar met Nafeek in October in the Dawadmi jail. “She looked cheerful and was anticipating the day of her release,” Kifaya told Arab News at the time.

Kifaya said Nafeek was worried about the social stigma that she would have to endure because of the case once she was out of jail.

“I do not know how the people in my village will react when they see me back home,” Kifaya quoted Nafeek as saying.

Nafeek arrived in Riyadh on May 4, 2005, to work as a maid in the household of Naif Jiziyan Khalaf Al-Otaibi. A few days later, she was transferred to work in her sponsor’s family home in Dawadmi, about 390 km west of Riyadh. Apart from performing daily household chores of cleaning, cooking, washing and ironing clothes, Nafeek was also entrusted with the responsibility of looking after the employer’s four-month-old infant son, which she was not trained to do.

The incident in which the infant died occurred around 12.30 p.m. on May 22, 2005, while Nafeek was bottle-feeding the child. The Dawadmi police arrested her the same day and it was then that she allegedly confessed to killing the child.

She repeated her confession in open court. However, at the court hearing on Feb. 3, 2007, she retracted the confession and informed the court that her original confession had been obtained by the police under duress.

In her statement to the court, the maid also claimed that at the time of her arrival in Saudi Arabia, she was 17 years old and that a recruitment agent had falsified her documents and obtained her passport by overstating her actual age by six years.

According to Nafeek’s passport, her date of birth is Feb. 2, 1982, whilst a copy of her birth certificate indicates her actual date of birth is Feb. 4, 1988.
 
Link: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1&section=0&article=104416&d=8&m=12&y=2007&pix=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom

8 December 2007