Parents Jailed for Abandoning their Daughter
An Asian man has been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for abandoning his week-old daughter and endangering her life. A Doha court of first instance also convicted him of maintaining illicit relations with a compatriot housemaid, the mother of the infant, who was also jailed for a year.
Two Indonesian friends of the parents were also sentenced to a year''s imprisonment for not informing the authorities about a crime they knew about. The court heard that a man found the infant in a basket in the Aziziya area while he was on his way to the mosque to perform dawn prayers.
The man said that there was a note attached to the basket which read: Please help our infant. The witness also said that he found a small bag containing milk and clothes nearby and informed the police.
Investigations led to the Indonesian man, who was identified as the father of the infant, and he was arrested in October 2008.
The father acknowledged that he had illicit relations with a compatriot woman employed in the house of a friend''s family in Wakrah. According to him, his lover delivered the baby in a car and a week later, he put the baby in a basket and placed it near the mosque.
A medical report confirmed that the accused was the biological father of the child. Explaining the conviction, the court said that the accused abandoned his own one-week old daughter and this was a serious crime. The convicts, all in their 20s, were ordered by the court to leave the country after serving the jail term.(QNA) |
