Sponsor arrested for Lankan maid's murder in Saudi

The Aziziyah District police have arrested the Saudi sponsor and his wife for the alleged murder of a Sri Lankan housemaid. The maid was found dead near her apartment prior to the police investigation, Arab News reported.

The Saudi sponsor and his wife reportedly staged-managed the crime to indicate that Kamalawathie Menike Wijetunge, 45, had committed suicide outside the apartment where she was working.

The police found Kamalawathie dead on the staircase with an empty Clorox bottle near her body. This gave the initial impression that she had drunk the disinfectant in a bid to commit suicide.

The postmortem report revealed that there was no disinfectant (liquid Clorox) in her body. Further investigations revealed black and blue marks on her body. The police then arrested the Saudi sponsor Mubarak Al-Dosary and his wife for the alleged murder.

Kamalawathie had come to the Kingdom in February last year to work for Al-Dosary. She had been working with the same sponsor till her death in December. She was married and came from a village in the Ampara district.

The Sri Lankan Embassy came to know of her death only in March when it made inquiries with the concerned authorities on a complaint made by her relatives that they had lost contact with the maid. Kamalawathie is the second Sri Lankan maid to have become a victim of abuse by local sponsors.

The other victim was Ihalagedarage Dayawathie, a Sri Lankan housemaid whose body was found in a desert in Al Jouf on Oct. 21 last year. Last week, her body was repatriated at the expense of Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) following police clearance. Hofuf police had arrested the Saudi sponsor Hamdan Ruwaishid and his wife Maryam bint Sadook for Daywathie's alleged murder.

The SLBFE received over 3,000 complaints last year from Sri Lankan women working as housemaids for breach of contract, harassment and unpaid or underpaid wages. Earlier this year, the Sri Lankan government had decreed a rise in pay for household workers by 15 percent in their work contracts, but the complaints of harassment and nonpayment of full dues have continued. Sri Lankan women workers send back a significant part of the $2.5 billion that Sri Lanka receives as remittances from overseas migrant workers. Remittances are a major foreign exchange earner for Sri Lanka.

A Sri Lankan diplomat at the Riyadh mission said that these are sporadic incidents. "Compared to the housemaid population in the Kingdom, these incidents constitute not even a fraction of the domestic work force," he stressed.