JEDDAH: A Saudi man who was convicted of torturing his nine-year-old daughter Areej to death was sentenced to death by a Jeddah court yesterday. The girl’s stepmother, who also took part in the murder, will be jailed for five years.
The court gave its verdict after hearing the views of both parties. The girl’s divorced mother and uncle had appointed a lawyer to represent them in court. The National Society for Human Rights was also following up on the case.
Areej reportedly died in the middle of last year. Officials from the Red Crescent Society discovered her body outside her home and, suspecting she had been tortured, informed police.
Security agents then arrested Areej’s father and his second wife. The two later confessed to torturing the girl to death and said they had beaten her and pressed a hot iron on different parts of her body.
Investigators took the couple to the scene of the crime to reconstruct events leading to the girl’s death. They confessed to throwing Areej from an upper-floor window of their home. It was suspected that the girl was already dead at the time.
Areej’s father had earlier denied torture, and said his daughter had committed suicide by jumping from the building. One report said that after Areej fell, the father and the stepmother left their home for some time before returning and reporting the fall as a suicide.
A police investigation found signs of torture on the body and after interrogation the couple admitted that they had tried to hide the cause of death. Police say they recovered items used to torture the girl, including hoses, a heavy stick and spoons that were heated over a fire.
Cases of domestic abuse related to divorced couples, often involving the stepmother and the biological father, have frequently been reported in the local media.
A father and stepmother, both Saudis, were publicly beheaded on Jan. 16 in Makkah for the torture and murder of the man’s nine-year-old daughter Ghosun from a previous marriage. In a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency, the Interior Ministry said Nashaat Ahmed Haji and his wife, Iman Ghazawi, were beheaded for killing the girl.
