Sri Lanka recalls envoy from Saudi after maid beheaded

January 11, 2013 - Sri Lanka has recalled its ambassador to Saudi Arabia in protest against the execution of a Sri Lankan housemaid over the death of an infant in her care in 2005, the government said on Thursday. 24-year old Rizana Nafeek, who had been in a prison in Saudi Arabia for the past seven years, was beheaded with a sword on Wednesday, in the town of Dawadmy, despite repeated appeals for clemency by the Sri Lankan government and human rights activists worldwide. Washington-based Human Rights Watch as well as London-based Amnesty International have condemned the execution saying Nafeek, who was minor of 17 year of age when the baby died, was a victim of flaws in Saudi Arabia's judicial system. She was accused by her Saudi employer of killing his infant daughter while she was bottle-feeding. "(This is) to show our displeasure for not hearing the government's appeal to save Rizana Nafeek," Karunatilake Amunugama, secretary of the External Affairs Ministry, told Reuters. "He (the envoy) has been recalled with immediate effect." The infant's mother rejected a request to forgive the maid, which is the most important criteria in considering the release of a murderer in Saudi Arabia, said a top Sri Lankan government official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Saudi Interior Ministry has said the infant was strangled after a dispute between the maid and the baby's mother. Hundreds of Sri Lankan women in the island nation's capital Colombo protested against Nafeek's execution on Thursday and said the government should have done more to seek her release.
The maid's mother asked the government to help her to bring her body back to Sri Lanka, local media reported. But government officials said she had been buried in Saudi Arabia. Saudi households are highly dependent on housemaids from African and South Asian countries. There have been cases reported of domestic abuse in which families mistreat their maids, who have then attacked the children of their employers. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that follows the strict Wahhabi school of Islam. Judges base decisions on their own interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, rather than on a written legal code or on precedent.