MAKKAH, 14 June 2006 — A Saudi woman is calling on the police and judiciary to protect her and her children from her mentally ill husband who has turned the family home into a torture camp. According to the woman, who prefers to remain anonymous, the man in his early fifties uses chains to tie her up and regularly beats her and her children for trivial reasons.
Fed up with years of torture, the woman now wants to separate. She has repeatedly sought help from the police and other government agencies. On each occasion her husband signs a letter promising to change but after a short while goes back to his old ways, she said. The woman showed Arab News five letters in which the husband had promised to mend his ways.
She said, “He sometimes questions whether the kids are his and uses this as an excuse to torture them.”
The woman said that her husband has turned the home into a torture house and regularly chains her to the bed and beats her up in front of her children. “He beats the children using wooden sticks and accuses them of opening the door to let strangers come and meet me,” she said.
On one occasion the man even had chained her for four months and would only release her when she wanted to use the bathroom.
The woman said when her husband learned that she was pregnant with their youngest child, he accused her of sleeping with other men and said the baby was not his. He continually beat her in order to abort the pregnancy.
Medical reports show that the man has a tendency to fabricate stories and he believes his lies to be true. “The report from the mental hospital in Taif shows that my husband hallucinates and is mentally ill,” she said.
When the couple lived in Dammam, the man even took his children to a police station there and had them admitted into social care.
The wife said, “When my brother heard about that, he came and had the kids released into my custody. The police then found that the father was not fit to take care of his children.”
Speaking to Arab News, the woman’s brother said his brother-in-law had caused a lot of emotional strain on his sister.
He added that three of the couple’s children are not even listed on the family identity card. He called on the social affairs department to rehabilitate his sister and her children in suitable accommodation because he was financially unfit to support them. He also wanted the children to be added to the family card.
“I refuse to allow my sister to go back to this monster who will continue torturing her. He is a great danger to my sister and her kids and plus he carries weapons with him,” the woman’s brother said.
