Singapore, July 16 : A domestic worker from Myanmar, who stabbed her employer’s 70-year-old Indian mother-in-law 26 times in 2018, has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Singapore.
Zin Mar Nwe, now 22, who was found guilty of murder by the High Court in May this year, took the extreme step after the woman abused and threatened to send her back to Myanmar, The Straits Times reported recently.
As it sentenced Zin to life imprisonment on July 4, the court heard that on June 25, 2018, the two women were alone in the flat when Zin grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed the victim multiple times.
She then left with some cash and went to her agency to ask for her passport, where she was arrested after a few hours.
After her arrest, the maid initially denied stabbing the victim but later admitted, according to the report.
Zin said she was physically abused by the victim, and in one of her statements to the police on July 1, 2018, she listed numerous instances of how the victim abused her.
She added the victim came to stay with her employer’s family on May 26, 2018, and would use her knuckles to knock Zin on her head or back whenever she did not understand what the victim wanted her to do.
Zin said on one occasion, while she was massaging the victim, the victim slapped her because she found the massage painful.
The purported trigger point was when the victim told Zin that she would be sent back to the agent the next day, which meant going back to her native country in debt.
Zin’s lawyer, Christopher Bridges, argued that she should instead be convicted of culpable homicide, relying on the psychiatric opinion of Dr Tommy Tan that she was suffering from adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood at the time.
Rejecting the defence, Justice Andre Maniam said that Zin was conscious that she was stabbing the victim.
Justice Maniam said Zin could remember details of the incident and was able to describe the stabbing to the police, which undermined Dr Tan’s conclusion that her mind was not conscious of what she was doing.
He, however, accepted that the victim had abused Zin to get her attention or reprimand her.
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