Saudi Gazette report RIYADH — A senior health official has claimed that expatriate residents are responsible for about 70 percent of murder cases referred to the forensic medicine departments at the Ministry of Health. Dr. Mashhoor Al-Waqdani, forensic consultant and head of the Protection from Abuse Team at the Riyadh Health Affairs, told Al-Hayat newspaper that around 10 percent of these crimes are committed by housemaids. He asked the Ministry of Labor and other concerned bodies to subject housemaids to psychological evaluations in their home countries before recruiting them. He said such an examination should be made a basic requirement for issuing a residency permits in the Kingdom. Al-Waqdani pointed to the gruesome murder of a Syrian girl named Isra, who was stabbed to death in her sleep, in Riyadh recently. The Kingdom has witnessed an increase in violence involving domestic workers, especially against the children of employers. A young girl named Tala was murdered by an Indonesian housemaid in Yanbu in 2012, while child Mishari was murdered by a housemaid in the Eastern Province in 2011. An African housemaid attacked her sponsor with a cleaver in 2012 and an Asian housemaid slaughtered her sponsor's child at Arar in 2012. Abdulrahman Al-Qarrash, a member of the national family security program, alleged that most housemaids sent to work in the Kingdom had previous crime records in their countries. He claimed that some of them had been sent to work in the Gulf states in order to solve overcrowding in prisons. He said one country in East Asia has over 3 million inmates in its prisons, and it decided to send some of the inmates to work in Gulf countries as domestic servants as a way of supporting them. “A large percentage of these inmates are illiterate and hold superstitious beliefs.” Al-Qarrash warned Saudi families against relying heavily on housemaids in taking care of their children. He called upon the authorities to set up daycare centers and nurseries at workplaces so that female employees can bring their children and leave them there. Such a step will protect children against crimes committed by housemaids. He said housemaids are recruited to perform household chores and not to take care of children. Children should not be left in their care because they do not have any skills in this field of work, he added. Al-Qarrash lambasted people who bring housemaids to take care of their elderly parents. He suggested that housemaids should work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and should not be allowed to stay overnight with children or elderly people.
