Saudi Arabia: Criminal Court sentences “Dammam kidnapper” to death
Five suspects, four Saudi and a Yemeni involved in serial kidnappings
The court also sentenced her Yemeni and Saudi partners, each 25 years in prison for helping her to kidnap the infants from a hospital in Dammam, a city in the Kingdom’s eastern province.
Five suspects, including four Saudi, the woman and three men, and a Yemeni man, have been convicted.
The fourth and fifth Saudi suspects were convicted of giving false testimonies when they signed official papers and birth certificates of the babies, claiming the babies belong to the abducted mother. One of the convicted saudis has fled the country. The Public Prosecution has reuqtested competenet authorities to bring him back to the country through Interpol.
The kidnapper, widely known by Saudi media as “Dammam kidnapper”, Mariam was arrested in February, 27 years after her first robbery of a three-day-old male infant in 1993.
The serial kidnappings of three male infants happened over a course of nine years. The first kidnapped boy was given the name “Nayef” by Mariam. The convicted woman was arrested seven months ago after she showed up at a police station to obtain national IDs for two boys, Nayef and Mohammed, claiming she had found them abandoned 20 years ago.
However, the police officer suspected something fishy and did not believe her story. He started looking into the old records and reports of kidnapped and missing children in Saudi Arabia. The case was referred to the Public Prosecution
The prosecutors decided to conduct DNA tests on all the children the claimed mother has, where all of them were a no match. Nayef’s profile matched the age of a baby who went missing from Al Qataif hospital in 1993 from Al Quraidi family. The DNA tests also showed a link between the other two boys and two kidnap reports filed in 1996 and 1999 in Damam.
Then, the serial kidnapper, now in her 50’s, was identified as “Mariam”, who lives in Damam and comes from a respected family. According to the reports, one of the two children was kidnapped from the Women and Childbirth Hospital in Dammam in 1996.
According to official birth certificates, Mariam claimed to have given birth to two boys, Mohammad and Nayef, and two girls from her first marriage.
Investigations show that her second victim was “Ali” (who turned out to be Mohammed Al Amari), kidnapped from Dammam Hospital, three years after the first kidnapping of Nayef. Reports also show that the third victim, Ansa, who turned out to be Moussa, was abducted from Dammam Hospital in 1999, three years after the second baby was kidnapped.