Maid stabs child 8 times while asleep

An Ethiopian housemaid waited for the four-year-old son of her Saudi employer to sleep, brought a kitchen knife and stabbed him eight times as she screamed "die… die", a newspaper in the Gulf Kingdom reported on Monday.

Sada quoted police as saying the maid stabbed the boy three times in the face, one in the hand and four in the back before she was controlled by the child’s mother.

The boy’s father, Ghareeb Qablan, said he was out when the maid attacked his son in his bedroom at home in the capital Riyadh while his mother was also in her bedroom.

“The mother tried to stop her but she kept stabbing the child and screaming. She stabbed him eight times before she was brought under control by the mother after a fight, which resulted in the mother’s injury,” Sada said, adding that the boy was admitted to the intensive care unit in a serious condition.

The incident on Sunday was the latest in a wave of attacks by housemaids, mainly Ethiopians, against their employers’ families in Saudi Arabia. The attacks have triggered public anger and calls for a ban on the import of Ethiopian domestic workers.

More than two million housemaids, mainly from Asia and Ethiopia, work in Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter and largest Arab economy.

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