The Peninsula/ Abdullah Abdulrahman

Doha, Jul 18: The expatriate woman who had to face the firing squad for stabbing her housemaid to death had a lucky escape as the family of the deceased has agreed to accept blood money and pardon her.

She will now be sentenced to 15 years in jail. The convict is pregnant and is in her early thirties. It so happened that the Industrial Area police got a call on the day of the incident saying that a maid employed by an expatriate household had committed suicide.

When the police reached the house at the address provided by the caller, they found the maid lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen and scattered nearby was a knife and an ash tray, among other things. The knife and the ash tray had traces of blood on them.

The investigating officer became suspicious and sure that it was not a case of suicide, did extensive questioning which revealed that it was a murder. The suspect was later taken into custody and interrogated. She was charge-sheeted and the court which conducted the trial sentenced her to death.

The embassy of the country to which the maid came from, however, convinced her family to accept blood money from the accused and pardon her so the death sentence could be commuted to life sentence.

It was actually a gruesome murder as the medical report suggested that the maid had serious fresh as well as old wounds all over her body suggesting that she might have been tortured.

The report suggested she suffered from burn injuries as well and they might have been inflicted using boiling liquids.

The wounds on her body suggested that she was hit many times over with sharp instruments. She had suffered as many as 43 injuries in her head alone, some of them from assault with an ash tray as the latter showed traces of blood on it.

However, what caused the maid’s death was stabbing with a kitchen knife in the stomach and chest. The wounds, according to the medical report, were deep.