BAHA, 29 April 2003 — A court in Baha has sentenced a man to 10 years in prison and 3,600 lashes, some of them to be administered in public, for torturing his wife, Al-Jadeeda magazine, a sister publication of Arab News, reported.
The wife lost her sight and hearing in addition to sustaining serious injuries all over her body because the husband emptied boiling water over her head, burned her with a heated piece of metal and used a vacuum cleaner to drown out her screams.
The woman’s brother, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the magazine that his brother-in-law came from a respectable family and worked in a government job.
“My sister seemed happy with him at first, especially after she had her first baby. But then she changed,” he said. “She didn’t visit us as often as she used to, and she always seemed sad when we came to see her.”
One night she rang her family and said she could not live with her husband any more. “We told her that every marriage has its rough patches, and advised her to be patient. But a week later she rang again, crying because of the way her husband treated her.”
The brother insists that she did not tell them her husband was beating her. “We thought it was normal,” he explained.
“Then one day we received a phone call from my brother-in-law’s family saying my sister was dead. We were very sad when we went to her house and remembered the phone calls she made. What if it was true that her husband had treated her badly?”
At the house they found her covered in blood but still alive and called an ambulance. “They took her to the hospital and we filed a report with the police. The husband at first denied any involvement but his father told us something different. He told us that his son was on drugs and was responsible for what happened to the poor girl. They did not tell anyone to avoid bringing shame on the family.
“The father told us that his son had come home one day and said he had killed my sister, so they went to see if they could save her.”
A relative of the husband told the magazine that his family had not seen him for a while. “But one day he came to the house, and he was shaking; he was very scared. He said he had killed his wife and did not know what to do.
“When we went to their house we found her on the floor and called her family. We knew that her husband was on drugs, but he was a very good man, and he used to be a role model to his brothers. It’s only after he got married that he began to change.
“He fell in bad company, and though we tried to stop him, we couldn’t,” the relative added.
The man’s family also failed to find forgiveness from the wife’s family, he said. “They insist on having him punished for torturing their daughter. But he is very sad and regrets everything he did, and he is also being treated for his drugs problem,” the relative told Al-Jadeeda.
The presiding judge in the case told the magazine that the husband was to receive 90 of the 3,600 lashes in public. “The wife is entitled to a divorce in this case because her husband poses a clear danger to her,” he added.
