Maid sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering elderly Indian woman in Singapore

A maid from Myanmar was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering her employer’s 70-year-old mother-in-law from India, a media report said on Sunday.

Zin Mar Nwe was found guilty of murder for intentionally inflicting multiple fatal stab wounds on the victim.

Mar Nwe was sentenced on July 4 after she admitted that she had stabbed the victim 26 times in anger after the woman threatened to send her back to the agent, reported The Straits Times.

The report said the maid was 17 years old when she arrived in Singapore to work on January 5, 2018 but her passport had her age as 23-years-old -- the minimum age to work as a domestic worker in Singapore.

Four months later, she started working for her third household -- a couple and their two teenage daughters.

Her latest employer, a financial controller identified by the court as Mr S, had hired her because his family’s maid for the past four years was returning home to the Philippines.

By her own accounts, Zin Mar Nwe had no complaints about her working conditions and had no issues interacting with Mr S’ family and her agents.

She woke up at about 5.30 am and went to bed at about 11 pm and also made multiple phone calls to her relatives in Myanmar.

Part of her SGD 450 monthly salary went towards repaying her loan to the maid agency.

About two weeks after she started work, her employer’s mother-in-law arrived from India on May 26, 2018, to stay with the family for a month, but she found it difficult to get along with the elderly woman.

The elderly woman began hitting the maid to get her attention or to reprimand her. Zin Mar Nwe said she was hit when she did not understand what the woman wanted her to do.

At the beginning, the elderly woman used her knuckles to knock the maid on her head and back two to three times a day on average. She later started using objects such as ladles.

The mother-in-law also started returning tit for tat when on many occasions the maid accidentally hurt her.

On the morning of June 25, 2018, the two women were alone at home when the older woman became upset with the maid for causing an object to drop on her foot and for missing her instructions.

As the older woman lay down on the sofa to watch television, she declared that the maid would be going back to the agent tomorrow.

Zin Mar Nwe understood that because S was already her third employer, this would result in her being sent back to her home country in debt.

Shaking with anger, she grabbed a knife and stabbed the elderly woman 26 times.

After the woman stopped moving, the maid ransacked one of the bedrooms in the flat, broke the lock of a cupboard and retrieved her belongings.

She washed the knife and left it in the kitchen, then changed into a dress and took a bag belonging to her. She left the flat after taking some cash and an ez-link card that had been placed on top of the microwave oven.

She went to her maid agency in Choa Chu Kang to get her passport, but left when she heard that the staff were about to call her employer.

Over the next five hours, she wandered around Singapore by bus, by MRT and on foot.

She bought bottles of mineral water and ate at a hawker centre before she finally took a taxi back to the agency. She was arrested there after the staff alerted the police of her return.

After dropping her off, the cabby found a bag containing SGD 114 in the back seat and tried to return it to her, but she denied that the bag was hers. Forensic tests later showed that some of the notes were stained with blood.

After her arrest, Zin Mar Nwe initially denied killing the elderly woman and pinned the blame on two men and even described the fictitious assailants in some detail.