The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Maid's death in Doha baffles kin

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 16, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Maid's death in Doha baffles kin

By our Special Correspondent

TIRUPATI, JULY 15. There is no breakthrough yet in the mysterious death of a servant maid from Tirupati, Gulabjan (45), in Doha. According to S. Karimulla, son of the deceased, she had been working since 1992 in the house of one, Jasim Mohammed S Sashwar, who interestingly is an officer in the Immigration Department in the Ministry of Interior, Criminal Investigation and Evidence.

During the last three months whenever Gulabjan telephoned her husband, Kalesha, a railway gateman in Tirupati, she was said to have been complaining that her masters were harassing and beating her up so badly that she wanted to give up her job and return home anytime. In her last call made on May 31 she was said to have been literally sobbing, saying that she was not able to take the torture anymore.

Rather intriguingly, on June 2, a phone call from her master's house said that Gulabjan was dead after being fatally knocked down by a `speeding truck.'

What introduced an element of suspicion into the whole episode was a reported phone call from a driver in the same house giving a `contradictory reason' for her death, said a complaint faxed by the son of the deceased to Doha's Director of Criminal Investigation and Evidence seeking an investigation into the case.

Copies of his complaint were distributed to mediapersons here today. Further the driver was also said to have warned the family members of the deceased not to open the `container' carrying the body because not only was the body `cut into pieces' but also any attempt to `make an issue' of the death would make them lose the insurance money of 1 lakh riyals.

The container was received in Chennai on June 4 and the body was buried `without any inspection'.

The family members grew suspicious further that it could well be a murder and not a natural death only when the husband of the deceased broke down and told them about Gulabjan's repeated complaints to him about the harassment she was being subjected to by her master.

Karimulla told mediapersons that though the SVU Campus police received his complaint, but did not however sound positive about doing anything on the ground that the incident took place outside India.

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