16 Nails Removed From Sri Lankan Maid's Body(Aug. 27) -- Surgeons today successfully removed 16 out of 24 nails that were hammered into a Sri Lankan woman when she worked as a maid for a family in Saudi Arabia earlier this year.
"She is in good condition, she's pain-free and she's very happy," Dr. Imalka Wettasinghe, a doctor at Kamburupitiya Base Hospital in the Matara district of Sri Lanka, told AOL News. "She has a lot of support around her, and she's glad the world knows about this."
Wettasinghe said surgeons did not remove the remaining eight nails, which are more like needles, during the three-hour operation. "They are very tiny but could cause nerve damage if they are taken out," she said. "For the moment, they are not hurting her."
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A doctor shows a nail extracted from the body of a Sri Lankan housemaid who underwent surgery to remove 24 nails allegedly embedded in her body by her Saudi Arabian employer.
The woman, identified as L.T. Ariyawathi, 49, went to Saudi Arabia on March 25 to work as a maid for a large Saudi Arabian family. She said her male employer stuck nails in her that had been heated by his wife. They were angry that she couldn't understand their language and that she told them she felt overworked, she said.
Before the surgery this morning, Ariyawathi met with reporters from the Sri Lankan city of Colombo and displayed open wounds on her hands, feet and forehead, where the nails had been hammered into her, according to one report by Al-Jazeera.
"The told me they would slit my throat if I screamed, so I had to keep silent and bear it," she said. "What else could I do?"
One of Ariyawathi's surgeons told the media today that inserting nails into someone is more than just torture; it can also lead to life-threatening complications.
"The nervous system and internal organs can be damaged by having nails like this," Dr. Prabath Gajadeera said. "It can also lead to germs entering and spreading in the body, so we are trying to remove as many nails a possible."
Ariyawathi told doctors and Sri Lankan officials that she persuaded her employers to let her leave after five months but that she had to pay her own plane ticket home and was not given all the income owed her. Ariyawath did not tell anyone about the alleged torture while she was in Saudi Arabia, for fear of reprisals. She flew back to Sri Lanka on Aug. 21. On Sunday, her children took her to the hospital, where X-rays revealed the 24 nails stuck in her body.
Sri Lanka's Foreign Employment Bureau sent an envoy to speak to Ariyawathi earlier this week and is in the process of reporting the incident to Saudi officials and seeking compensation for her. About 1.4 million Sri Lankans work in the Middle East, most of them as domestics. Saudi Arabia hosts more than 5.5 million foreign workers, many of them from Asian countries, and there have been reports for years that some of them are systematically mistreated with little legal recourse.
No one answered repeated calls by AOL News to the Saudi Arabia Embassy in Colombo.
Wettasinghe said Ariyawathi's husband and about five of her children were with her at the hospital today after her surgery. She said that Ariyawathi's husband had not wanted her to take the job in Saudi Arabia but the family needed the money.
"All of them are very angry now about that stupid family," Wettasinghe said.
"They have a hard life," Wettasinghe added. "I can't even say they live in a house. It has only a roof and several walls. It is hard for some women in Sri Lanka. They have to feed the children and the husband first, and they're the ones who suffer. They don't have good nutrition and diet, which is why [Ariyawathi] looks much older than her age."
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/16-nails-removed-from-body-of-sri-lankan-maid-lt-ariyawathi/19610766Yet another shining example of Muslim tolerance. Where's Sorcha Faal, aka SamsonEnterprises, to regale us with fairy tales about how well non-Muslims are treated in Muslim countries? Nevermind that slavery is still actively practiced in over a dozen Muslim countries or that the family responsible for doing this to this poor woman will probably face no repercussions for their horrifically intolerant actions.
