RIYADH, 24 March 2004 — A 50-year-old woman hid her gold jewelry in her womb in a desperate attempt to prevent her siblings from depriving her of the last of her inheritance, according to a press report.
Al-Watan newspaper said the woman’s siblings had stripped her of her inheritance from her father and her late husband and kept her locked up in a room with boarded-up windows for 11 years.
Her brother left her on the doorstep of Al-Eiman Hospital in Riyadh 10 days ago afraid that she would die of malnutrition.
The hospital administration investigated her case because she arrived with no legal proof of identity.
The woman is severely anemic and skeletally thin after years of living on a diet of bread and fruit peel, the paper said.
Doctors are waiting for her hemoglobin levels to stabilize before removing the jewelry from her womb.
A nurse said the woman, whose name was given as Maryam, had not washed in months, if not years, and no one had visited her since her admittance to the hospital.
She said Maryam has an abnormal appetite and other patients give her their meals because the hospital portions are too small.
Maryam reportedly said she was driven to hiding the jewelry in her womb by fears that here siblings were going to take it from her as they had everything else.
Even in her husband’s lifetime her siblings abused her, she said, burdening her with chores so heavy they damaged the bones in her right hand.
When her husband died she refused to let her brothers act as legal representatives because of their abuse.
When she threatened to report them, they locked her up, she said. During her 11 years of captivity, she was only permitted to see one sister every four or five months.
She inserted the jewelry in two stages over several months and both times suffered vaginal bleeding and fainting spells, she said.
