RIYADH — A traffic court in Al-Kharj ordered Sunday to pay the blood money of a Lankan maid who died in a car accident 24 years ago. The delay was due to the case filed being misplaced for years.
Traffic Court judge Kalaf Al-Mutlaq ordered Fahd Al-Qahtani, a Saudi schoolteacher, to pay SR25,000 to the next of kin of V.M. Indrawathie, who died when she was 30 years old in a car accident in Al-Kharj, 60 km from Riyadh.
According to the police report, the accident had taken place on Aug. 11, 1984, when Al-Qahtani, who was 17 years old at the time, crashed his car into another vehicle after he swerved into the wrong side of the road.
Indrawathie’s employer Ali Al-Otaibi and his wife also died in the accident.
Explaining the cause of the undue delay in dispensing the case, W.S.M.S. Wjiesundera, charge d’affaires at the Sri Lankan Embassy, told Arab News that the case file was misplaced in the area’s Traffic Department and the mission could not pursue the case without the relevant file.
“Due to persistent requests from the dead woman’s family through the Foreign Ministry in Colombo, I took a personal interest with the help of my translator Osama Zubair, who extracted Indrawathie’s document from a bundle of files found discarded in the concerned department,” the diplomat said.
Indrawathie, who was from Badulla, a hill station 200 km from Colombo, came to the Kingdom immediately after her marriage and had no children.
Al-Qahtani handed over the blood money to the Sri Lankan mission yesterday. Wijesundera said that he would send the money to the Public Trustee in the Sri Lankan capital who will divide the cash between Indrawathie’s husband V.M. Kularatne and her 80-year-old mother, R.V. Yaso Hamy.
