Sana’a: Five years after his son’s botched circumcision, Sultan Al Samae has approached a court in the southern city of Taiz looking to be compensated. In 2009, Al Samae’s son, Abdul Gaher, was admitted to a government hospital in Taiz to carry out a routine circumcision, a common practice among Muslims.
The surgery was performed by an anaesthesia technician, and the boy’s penis was burnt during the procedure.
“To cover his mistake, the man wrapped the penis with a piece of gauze and asked the father to unwrap it a week later,” Usama Al Asbahi, the boy’s lawyer, told Gulf News. After the gauze was removed a week later, Al Samae said that his son’s penis was inflamed and the skin was peeling off.
In 2010, Al Samae brought the case to court and was awarded compensation; the technician was jailed. However, Al Samae was surprised to learn than the man had been released. The father, in a fit of emotion, stripped his son naked in front of the judges in the Taiz court to remind them of the tragedy caused by the botched operation.
“The judges were horrified,” Al Asbahi said.
The hospital then formed a committee of six doctors to investigate the matter which cleared the technician from blame. Al Asbahi says the report was a cover-up citing evidence from a coroner who independently examined the case. The coroner placed the blame squarely on the technician. The six doctors were prosecuted for fraud and the court has since then suspended their medical licences.
Al Samae hopes to send his son abroad to undergo a penis transplant operation but he says that since the court ordered both the hospital and the technician to pay damages — the combined sum over Dh400,000 — he has yet to receive any money.
