Manama: Kuwait’s Court of Appeals has overturned the death sentence for father and a mother who tortured their four-year-old daughter to death and kept her body in a freezer.
The court in its new ruling sentenced the father to 10 years in jail and acquitted the mother.
The reasons that made the appeals court abolish on Monday the verdicts pronounced by a lower court were not reported.
According to the case documents, the 26-year-old father in May last year beat his daughter Isra with an electrical wire and poured hot water on her in front of her mother, 23, and three younger siblings.
Security sources said that 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 sources said
Forensic doctors reported that 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 sources 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.
In its statement, the interior ministry said the parents were on drugs at the time of the murder.
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.
