A maid pleaded for help as she dangled from a window of a seven-story building while her boss just filmed the encounter, according to video footage of the incident.
Warning: Graphic video:
The Ethiopian woman, who worked as a domestic servant, survived the fall from the seven-story apartment building in Kuwait City with just a broken arm and bleeding from her nose and ear, the New York Post reported.
In the video, the woman can be seen hanging by a knuckle as she screams.
“Oh, crazy. Come here,” a woman says casually in Arabic, holding a camera up to the maid.
“Hold on to me! Hold on to me!” the maid yells.
Instead, the woman steps back and watches as the maid loses her grip, plunging seven stories to the ground below.
The worker claims that she was attempting to escape someone trying to kill her inside the apartment.
“The lady put me in the bathroom and was about to kill me in the bathroom without anybody finding out. She would have thrown my body out like rubbish, so instead of staying there, I went to save myself and then I fell,” she said, according to local media reports.
Police have arrested her boss, who filmed the video, for both failing to help and posting the video on social media, the AFP reports.
The boss claims she filmed the incident as evidence in case authorities accused her of killing the maid, according to the Independent.
Under Kuwait law, filming the incident itself is not a crime, but the employer could be charged with negligence and failure to offer help when someone was in grave danger, the Kuwait Times states. Such a penalty carries a maximum sentence of three months in jail.
Investigators are still trying to determine whether the incident was a suicide attempt, an accident that occurred while the maid was working, or a case of attempted homicide or libel.
Accusations of abuse from employers are common in the Gulf state, which employs about 600,000 foreign domestic workers, who mostly come from Asia and Africa.