JEDDAH, 2 June — A 30-year-old man from a village in the Taif region was arrested recently on charges of strangling his wife and their young daughter to death, press reports said yesterday.
The man committed the ghastly crime allegedly to take revenge on his in-laws, Al-Madinah newspaper said.
Police suspect that the man had taken his 26-year-old wife and the four-year-old girl to a desolate area near Mahd Al-Dahab and strangled them there, the paper said. They were visiting relatives in the region.
But in his confessions to the police, the man claimed that he had strangled his wife in a fit of rage when she informed him of the death of their child in an accident which he thought was caused by her negligence. He said his car broke down on the way and he was trying to get it repaired when his wife told him that their daughter was sitting motionless in the car.
The man took his wife and baby to the Hawiya Hospital, about 250 kilometers away, but the doctors pronounced them dead a few hours earlier.
The alleged killer refused to admit responsibility for his daughter’s death. He said it was his wife who caused the baby’s death.
Al-Madinah said police had registered a case against him following a quarrel with his in-laws and he had committed the crime to take revenge on them.
The paper said the man was taken to the Mahd Al-Dahab police station on Thursday to complete the investigations.
According to Al-Jazira newspaper, the man and his wife quarreled while discussing a family problem. It said police were still probing the case to determine the real motive behind the double murder.
Meanwhile, Taif police found the body of a sixty-year-old Saudi near the vegetable market in the city recently. Police later confirmed that the man had died of natural causes.
Three students die in accident: Three students of the Najd private school in Riyadh died in a terrible road accident on Wednesday. The accident occurred while they were returning home in a private car after taking examinations at the school.
Two other students who were in the car and their Filipino driver are in hospital with serious injuries, Al-Jazira reported yesterday.
