Myanmar maid who stabbed employer’s mum-in-law 26 times gets life term for murder

SINGAPORE – A domestic worker convicted of murder by stabbing her employer’s mother-in-law 26 times, after the 70-year-old threatened to send her back to Myanmar, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Tuesday.

Zin Mar Nwe, now 22,

was found guilty of murder by the High Court in May.

While her passport reflected her age as 23 at the time of the incident, she revealed during investigations that she was actually 17 years old, and had been instructed by her agent to lie about her age.

A bone-age test conducted by Tan Tock Seng Hospital confirmed that the bone-age of Zin Mar Nwe is “most likely 17 years”.

Under the Criminal Procedure Code, a person who is below 18 at the time of the offence cannot be sentenced to death.

Thus, the only sentence available was that of life imprisonment, said Justice Andre Maniam.

Zin Mar Nwe started working for her third employer, Mr S, on May 10, 2018. On May 26, the family of four was joined by the man’s mother-in-law, who came from India for a one-month stay.

On June 25, the two women were alone in the flat when the maid grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed the victim multiple times.

The Myanmar national said she was physically abused by the 70-year-old, but the stabbing was triggered by the woman’s threat to send her back to the agent, which would result in her being sent home in debt.

After she stabbed the victim, the maid left the unit with some cash and went to her agency to ask for her passport. She left the place when she heard that the staff were about to call her employer.

She roamed around for five hours before returning to the agency, where she was arrested.

The victim and her family members cannot be identified owing to a gag order as one of the witnesses in the trial is below 18.

After her arrest, the maid initially denied stabbing the victim and pinned the blame on two men.

During her trial, Zin Mar Nwe’s assigned lawyer, Mr Christopher Bridges, argued that she should instead be convicted of culpable homicide, relying on psychiatric opinion of Dr Tommy Tan that she was suffering from adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood at the time.

But Justice Maniam rejected this defence. He said he preferred the opinion of Dr Alias Lijo that she was not suffering from any mental illness at the time that reduced her responsibility for her actions.

The judge also did not accept Dr Tan’s opinion that she was in a “dissociative state” at the time of the stabbing. He found that she was conscious that she was stabbing the victim.

He noted that she could remember details of the incident and was able to describe the stabbing to the police.

That undermined Dr Tan’s conclusion that her mind was not conscious of what she was doing, said the judge.

Justice Maniam accepted that the victim had hit the maid to get her attention or reprimand her, and that the elderly woman had retaliated when the maid accidentally hurt her.

According to Zin Mar Nwe, days after the victim came to stay, the woman started to use her knuckles to

knock the maid on her head or back

whenever she did not understand what the victim wanted her to do.

She said she got, on average, two to three knocks a day.

She said on one occasion, while she was massaging the victim, the elderly woman slapped her because she found the massage painful.

On another occasion, the maid had turned on the stove wrongly, resulting in a sudden burst of flames that burned the victim slightly. 

Zin Mar Nwe said the victim then pulled her hand close to the flames.