Saudi woman handed death sentence for killing Bangladeshi maid
A criminal court in Riyadh on Sunday handed a Saudi national the death penalty for the murder of a Bangladeshi domestic worker, in a rare trial exposing the abuse of migrant workers in the kingdom.
Abiron Begum Ansar, a 40-year-old domestic worker, was found dead in Riyadh in March 2019 after being beaten to death by her employers.
Her family said Ansar’s body was “unrecognisable” when it was repatriated back to Bangladesh seven months later.
Ayesha al-Jizani was sentenced on Sunday to death by the court for killing Abiron Begum in March 2019, some two years after Begum went to the Gulf state in search of better paid work, a Bangladeshi government official said.
Begum’s relatives urged the Bangladeshi government to take action against the brokers who “tricked” Begum, 40, into taking the job in Saudi Arabia four years ago.
“(She) wanted to go abroad to earn more money so that she could pay for her aged parents,” Ayub Ali, Begum’s brother-in-law, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“They started torturing her two weeks after she left. She would call us and cry … we begged the brokers here to bring her back, but no one listened to us.
