A number of chilling crimes took place in the Kingdom in 2008 that grabbed the attention of the people and underscored the need for measures to stem domestic violence. Jeddah residents were shocked in March when a 25-year-old Syrian man picked a knife off a shelf at a supermarket and beheaded his 15-month-old nephew in a vegetable aisle in front of the child’s mother. The man then waited for the police, later explaining that he decided to put the child out of a misery caused by a messy divorce between his sister and her husband. Barely three weeks after this incident a Syrian mother was charged with infanticide after police said she strangled her three-year-old daughter. Again, an unhappy marriage that was ending in divorce was said to be the cause of the gruesome murder.
Psychiatrists and columnists say such horrendous acts of domestic violence are on the rise, and they attribute the increase to the stress caused by a troublesome and fast-paced life. It is difficult to ascertain if such crimes are truly on the rise, or whether they are simply being given more attention by the media. But whatever the case, there seems to be a problem, and not just in Jeddah.
In Riyadh, a 40-year-old man viciously beat his 12-year-old daughter and tied one of her feet to a wall and one of her hands to a door. According to police, he then went shopping and returned a few hours later to find that the girl had died.
The year didn’t end before another horrendous act was chronicled in Jeddah’s Al-Faisaliah neighborhood. On Dec. 17 police arrested a man whose thobe was covered with blood. He was accused of stabbing and slitting the throat of his 19-year-old daughter Imtihan. The motive, according to the girl’s stepfather and biological mother, was that the father couldn’t accept the idea of his girl attending medical school where she would be mixing with men in the workplace.
The murder took place after the girl’s uncles intervened and got her admitted to a local medical college despite her father opposing her admission. The girl lived with her mother and stepfather, who claim the father rarely visited her and never paid expenses in raising her child. The girl’s grandmother, who was in the home when the crime took place, died of a stroke after learning what had just happened in the next room.
This case will continue to unfold next year, but some cases were closed in 2008 with what some believe was justice served.
Another case involved the execution of Nashaat Ahmed Haji and his wife Iman Ghazzawi in Makkah. The public beheadings brought to a close a terrible case of child abuse — the murder of nine-year-old Ghosun, who was Ahmed Haji’s biological daughter.
Both the father and the stepmother were complicit in the torture and murder of the girl. The biological mother had tried for months to reclaim the custody of the girl but failed to make the authorities act or win the custody of the girl.
It was not until Ghosun’s life ended that justice was served in the form of a public beheading of the couple found guilty of cold-blooded murder.