Sri Lankan maid rescued after 10 years of house arrest in Saudi

Mohammed Rasooldeen in Saudi Arabia

SAUDI ARABIA : The Sri Lankan Embassy in Riyadh in cooperation with the Riyadh police, rescued Wednesday, Anista Marie, a Sri Lankan maid, who has been under virtual house arrest for the past 10 years and was not paid her salary for eight years by her sponsor.

On August 14, the maid sought the intervention of the concerned authorities to rescue her from her Saudi home in Riyadh through Arab News, a popular daily in the Middle East.

“We are thankful to the Saudi authorities for rendering the necessary assistance to redeem the girl from this house where she was a slave for more than a decade ,” W. S. M. S. Wijesundera charge d affaires of the Sri Lankan Embassy told Daily News as soon as the maid was brought to the mission yesterday.

He added that the mission had to send a team of officials with the Saudi police to take her out from the clutches of the sponsors who were women without any jobs.

“I cannot still believe that I am out of this ordeal which I underwent for the past 10 years,” Anista Marie told Arab News with tears flowing down her cheeks. “I do not want anything now but to fly home to see my children who have been suffering like orphans with their parents,” Marie said.

Forty-year old Marie, from a poverty-stricken fishing family , is from Chilaw. The maid has four children back home, including two girls and her eldest son who was 10 at the time of her departure from the island is 20 now. During this period, she lost her fisherman husband in Sri Lanka but she came to know two years after his death through a third party.

During her stay in this house, she did not know her wherabouts, she came to know that she is in the capital through an Indonesian housemaid who visited her workplace with another Saudi family.

According to the maid, the household consists of three women with four teenage daughters. “There were no men in the house,” she said. “They assaulted me when I say that I wanted to go home. It’s worse when I talked about the salary.”

Wijesundera said that the mission will negotiate with the sponsor to pay her past dues including her salary, holiday pay and other relevant allowances according to the local regulations.

“ She comes from a poor family and she needs some money immediately. I will request my community members and the Sri Lankan Expatriates Society to give her a helping hand in whatever forms to rehabilitate her family back home,” the diplomat said.