Manama: A court in Kuwait on Monday sentenced a couple to death by hanging after it found them guilty of torturing their four-year-old daughter until she died.
However, the sentence is not final and can be challenged at the Court of Appeals and subsequently at the Court of Cassation.
The parents were arrested in May last year and the father, Salem Bouhan, 26, confessed that he beat his daughter Isra with an electrical wire and poured hot water on her in front of her mother, 23-year-old Amira Hussain, 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 added.
Forensic doctors said the body had burns on the shoulders and feet and carried 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 with an electrical wire for her negligence in the flat.
He added that when he saw her deteriorating 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 refused to stay in the flat where the body was hidden, and he took 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 hospitalised 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 said to be extremely negligent in the upbringing of their children and their flat was disorganized and dirty.
A statement issued by the interior ministry said that the father and his wife were on drugs at the time of the murder.
The statement confirmed that the girl’s body had traces of torture.
