Saudi Gazette
JEDDAH — The body of an expatriate woman who reportedly worked as a housemaid in Saudi Arabia for about two decades was repatriated to her home country more than two years after her death following a brief illness. The absence of her biometric details in the Passport Department's system was the main cause of delay in repatriating her body.
Sanasy Suppiah, hailing from the central province of Sri Lanka, did not have any valid residency documents in her possession at the time of her death. She had come to the Kingdom on a housemaid's visa in 1995, but her residency documents were not processed by her employer, according to her case history.
In December 2015, Suppiah, who was seriously ill, was brought to a hospital in Dammam and abandoned there by an unidentified woman. She died in the hospital on Dec. 25, 2015.
Since nobody claimed her body, hospital authorities desperately attempted to trace her details but failed. Later with the help of the police they found a copy of her passport in a bundle of cloths. Based on that, it was established that the woman was a Sri Lankan national. The passport had expired in 2000.
The Sri Lankan Embassy was informed of the case in 2016, but the repatriation of the body turned out a big challenge for the diplomats. With the help of community members in the Kingdom and officials back home, the embassy was able to trace the whereabouts of Suppiah's family.
However, the embassy's struggle did not end there. It took two years to identify and locate the woman's sponsor in the Kingdom. The sponsor had died and her family claimed that they had nothing to do with the maid.
Owing to a lack of residency documents and biometric records, it was not an easy task to process the exit procedures to repatriate the body.
Nass Shoukat Vokkam, a social worker from India, helped the embassy officials to complete the process. He said three top officials from the Passport Department, Abdulaziz Al-Seif, Mamdouh Rasheedi and Fahad Al-Asoos, spent considerable time helping to repatriate the woman's body.
