Couple charged with manslaughter of Bangladeshi domestic helper

AMMAN­ — The Criminal Court prosecutor on Saturday charged an Irbid couple with the manslaughter of a 33-year-old Bangladeshi domestic helper over the weekend, official sources said.

The victim, who was not identified, was rushed to hospital after her employers claimed she was found unconscious in the bathroom, a senior official source said.

She was declared dead on arrival. Attending physicians at the hospital noticed that there were bruises on her body and alerted the authorities, the official told The Jordan Times.

The body was sent to the Irbid National Institute of Forensic Medicine for an autopsy, and government physicians detected several old and new bruises on different parts of her body, a senior medical source said.

“But the fatal blow was detected on her head, which caused internal bleeding that led to her death,” the medical source told The Jordan Times.

The couple was immediately summoned by Criminal Court Prosecutor Qahtan Qawaqzeh, and the two confessed to beating up the woman regularly because “she was not good at house work and was not clean”.

The husband told Qawaqzeh that he would regularly beat up the woman with his hands and a wooden stick to “push her to do her work”.

The wife, who is three-months pregnant, also confessed to beating up the woman with an iron bar to “encourage her to perform well in house work and become cleaner”, according to the senior official.

The couple claimed that they had beaten up the victim on Thursday and that “she went to the bathroom to take a shower and sleep there. They left her there and on Friday went to check on her and found her unconscious”, the official source added.

The two suspects told investigators they did not check on her for two days because they “knew that she loved to sleep a lot and that they heard her at one time snoring”, the official source added.

Officials at the Bangladeshi embassy in Amman could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

The victim had been working for the suspects, who have three daughters all under five years old, for the past year-and-a-half, according to the senior source.

Both suspects were ordered detained by Qawaqzeh for 15 days at correctional and rehabilitation facilities pending further investigation.