Jakarta — An Indonesian woman has confessed to lying and using her daughter to cook up a false story about “her dead Saudi husband”.

Saudi Ambassador to Jakarta Osama Al-Shoaibi told Al-Arabiya on Saturday that an investigation into the case revealed that the woman had cooked up a lie.

Ten-year-old Haifa, who lives in Indonesia, appeared in a video on social media earlier this year appealing for help to reach out to her late father’s family and relatives in Saudi Arabia.

The ambassador received her along with her mother and pledged to follow up on their case, which evoked national interest in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

The Saudi embassy in Jakarta even gave them a sum of money to meet their needs pending the results of the inquiry.

There were also reports of Saudi tourists in Indonesia providing monetary support to the mother and daughter.

Shoaibi said the mother confessed to lying about the whole story.

The Indonesian woman, named Mona, had said that her “late Saudi husband” had married her 11 years ago, when she was 18, and that he was killed in a traffic accident four years later.

Shoaibi said the embassy did not find anything in its records or archives about the death of Sultan Al-Harbi, the girl’s purported father. He said there was no Saudi embassy or national airline record of Harbi being transferred to Saudi Arabia, nor was there a record of a transfer from Indonesia to another country.

The Indonesian police investigation found that Mona had given conflicting reports about her “husband’s transfer and burial” and concluded that she had confessed to lying in all her statements.

The police also found no record of the death in Indonesia.

The Saudi ambassador placed blame on a Saudi tourist who had filmed and posted the video of Mona’s appeal to social media, without verifying the claims with the embassy first.

He said it was clear the woman was trying to capitalize on the girl’s perceivably Arab facial features and aimed to fleece money from visiting Saudi tourists.

Shoaibi said that the Saudi who filmed the video escaped from Indonesia because he “knew he had made a mistake” in not reporting the case to Saudi authorities first. — Al Arabiya English