She was relating her side of the story to Al-Watan newspaper more than 30 days after committing the crime.

“My husband (Ahmad’s father) was preoccupied with his laptop and had no time for me. He also physically abused me,” Al-Watan quoted the stepmother on Friday after talking to her in a Taif prison.

The newspaper said she did not retract nor contradict her story. “I loved the child and did not intend to kill him,” she said during the interview while in the same breath called the child a retard.

“I was pressured to marry Ahmad’s father (her second husband) more than four years ago, and two months ago, I gave birth to a baby boy. We named him Thamir,” she said, adding that her husband paid more attention to his computer than her.

The woman said on the day of the crime, Ahmad urinated on her while his father was busy in another room with his laptop.

“I reacted. In my blind anger I threw him hard to the ground and also hit him when he was down,” the stepmom said.

A series of events and the fear of being caught out combined in her taking the next fatal steps. “The child began to convulse. I tried to revive him but he did not respond,” she said.

It was at this stage that she took actions that led to the child’s death. “I changed his clothes, put him on the bed,” she said, adding, when things quieted down I, out of fear of what would happen to the boy, decided to take him to hospital on my own.

“I carried him on my shoulders and went out. He was still alive. I could feel him breathing. I stopped a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Al-Hada hospital but he did not know the route to the hospital. I then tried to visit some clinics but a passing patrol car made me change course as panic set in.

“Then I saw a deserted building. I entered the first floor and left the child there. I covered him with a garbage bag to ward off stray cats and dogs. He was still alive when I left him. He looked at me with severe pain in his eyes. I kissed him on his forehead and asked for forgiveness. I then told him that his mother would come soon. I left the building in panic and reached home after midnight. Amid all this, his father was still busy with his laptop,” she said.

The stepmother had already set up an alibi in which, she said, she intended to say that the boy was kidnapped whenever anyone asked about Ahmad’s whereabouts, and that it was the housemaid who noticed that the child was missing.

She added that during the nine days that followed the murder, her husband felt that she was hiding something from him, “but I managed to divert his suspicions.”

“It was only when Ahmad’s two sisters, Ritaj and Rose, asked me about their brother, that my resolve broke. Also by that time, Ahmad’s voice had come to haunt me all day long,” she added.