When Kasthuri Munirathinam crawled out of the window of a second floor apartment in Riyadh, she was scared for her life.
The 55-year-old Indian housemaid from the southern state of Tamil Nadu was determined to escape from her employer's apartment where she worked as a domestic help.
She had been in Saudi Arabia for just two months, one of thousands of Indians heading to the Gulf states every year for work, but was terrified she would never see her family again.
"I thought they would kill me. I had to escape. I wasn't given enough to eat. They had my wages, my passport, my phone," Munirathinam told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview in her home in Vellore, 150 km (90 miles) from Chennai.
Munirathinam's desperate bid to escape last September hit international headlines after the housemaid said her employer had chopped her hand off in the affray, with the injury resulting in an operation to amputate her arm. Full story...
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The 55-year-old Indian housemaid from the southern state of Tamil Nadu was determined to escape from her employer's apartment where she worked as a domestic help.
She had been in Saudi Arabia for just two months, one of thousands of Indians heading to the Gulf states every year for work, but was terrified she would never see her family again.
"I thought they would kill me. I had to escape. I wasn't given enough to eat. They had my wages, my passport, my phone," Munirathinam told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview in her home in Vellore, 150 km (90 miles) from Chennai.
Munirathinam's desperate bid to escape last September hit international headlines after the housemaid said her employer had chopped her hand off in the affray, with the injury resulting in an operation to amputate her arm. Full story...
Related posts:
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- India moves to stop flow of housemaids to Saudi Arabia after hand-chopping...
- Video of weeping Indian goes viral, Saudi government jails him...
- 1,000 Indian workers dead. The grim reality of Qatar's FIFA World Cup dream...
- Indian migrants return home with horror tales from UAE...