Manama: A Kuwaiti father who tortured his four-year-old daughter to death and kept her body in a freezer has been arrested.
Salem Bouhan, 26, eventually confessed that he beat his daughter Isra with an electrical wire and poured hot water on her in front of her mother, 23, and three younger siblings.
According to a security source, the investigation department received a tip about a suspicious murder in a flat in the Salmiya area in the capital Kuwait City.
Investigators searched the flat and found a bag in the freezer in which they found the frozen body of a young girl, the source told Kuwaiti daily Al Rai.
Forensic doctors said the body had burns on the shoulders and feet and traces of torture.
During his questioning, the father, reportedly a drug addict, said that his daughter took one of his pills and died.
However, he later admitted that he tortured her with hot water and beat her up with an electrical wire for her negligence in the flat. He added that when he saw her condition, he went down to a pharmacy and bought her medicines, but she passed away.
The father then went to the market and bought a freezer and placed Isra's body inside it.
His wife, a foreigner, refused to stay in the flat where the body was hidden, and he was forced to take her and their three children to another location.
However, they complained that the place was unbearably hot and that they could not stay there.
He took them to the flat of his mother and asked her to accommodate them for a few days, the source added.
The father told his mother that the eldest daughter had been hospitalized and that he would stay with her at the hospital.
Upon hearing the details, investigators headed to the flat where they arrested Isra's mother for her complicity in the murder of her daughter.
Further investigations revealed that the father and mother consumed drugs and that the father had been fired from work for showing up in an abnormal state.
The parents were also found to be extremely negligent in the upbringing of their children and that their flat was disorganized and dirty.
The investigations are continuing, the source added.
In its statement, the interior ministry said that the murder occurred last week and that the father and his wife were on drugs at the time.
The investigations indicated that the father bought the freezer on the same day he killed his daughter and that he was the one to put her in a bag.
The statement confirmed that the girl's body had traces of torture.