Manama: A Bahraini man accused of murdering an Indonesian housemaid at the family home was sentenced to life in prison.
The verdict was announced by the high criminal court on Monday 13 months after the 38-year-old man was spotted trying to dump the body of Ami Tursiya Takiyat, 29, in a wasteland in Sitra, a town 10 kilometres south of Manama, the capital.
According to court papers, the crime occurred in September 2008 as the man was fixing the garage door of his house where he lived with his mother. He spotted the housemaid in the garage, seemingly agitated. When he enquired about the cause of her anger, she allegedly insulted him and his mother. When he asked her about the reasons for the insults, she reiterated them.
Infuriated by her words, he threw a sharp device on the right side of her neck, causing her to fall to the floor and to hit a water tank in the garage.
The Bahraini man checked her pulse twice, could not find any and concluded that she died. He put the body in the trunk of a car he had borrowed from his friend two days earlier and headed towards the sea off Sitra where he planned to dump it. However, when he arrived there, a Bangladeshi worker saw the maid's leg hanging from the car and alerted his boss who was with him and a second labourer on the shoreline.
The boss asked the suspect to open the trunk, but following an argument, he managed to escape with the body still in his car.
However, the police arrested the suspect less than 24 hours later after identifying his car in a nationwide manhunt. The Bahraini man claimed that the victim had insulted him.
His lawyer in subsequent trials argued the defendant suffered from a mental illness and could not be accused of premeditated murder.
