KUWAIT: A woman jumped to her death from Jaber Causeway yesterday in a case that Kuwait police are investigating as a suicide. Firemen headed to the scene in response to an emergency call reporting that a woman jumped from the bridge. Shuwaikh and Salmiya sea rescue men recovered the woman's dead body from the waters, Kuwait Fire Force said in a statement. The woman was not identified in the statement, and the motive was not immediately known either as the case remains under investigation.
This is the first documented successful suicide case on the suspended bridge to be reported by authorities in Kuwait since the causeway was inaugurated two years ago. However, there has been several reported unsuccessful suicide attempts from the bridge in the past. In July, the Interior Ministry said that a traffic policeman had stopped a woman from jumping from the causeway in an apparent suicide attempt.
The Traffic Department had published a video showing a police officer stepping in and catching a woman while she was trying to climb off the bridge, bringing her back to safety before he and other officers are seen attending to her in her car. The officer was on patrol on the causeway when he approached the vehicle that had stopped on the side of the road, as seen in the video which is dated on July 19th. He checked on the driver then waited for the vehicle to move, but instead the woman walked out of the car and approached the railing, then he ran towards her and caught her while she started climbing it.
Yesterday's incident follows a string of reported suicide cases in Kuwait recently. A local report a couple of days ago had indicated that police opened an investigation in the death of a man who allegedly committed suicide in his family's home in Abdullah Al-Mubarak. Preliminary investigations indicated that the 27-year-old Kuwaiti man died by hanging inside his room.
In the meantime, a similar investigation was opened in the death of a Hawally resident who had allegedly committed suicide by jumping. According to the police report, the 26-year-old Indian man leaped from a 10th floor apartment in a building in the area in the early hours of Saturday morning. The man was going through financial troubles that had likely driven him to end his life, according to preliminary investigations.
Human trafficking
In other news, Residency Affairs Department detectives arrested a wanted Arab resident running a bogus domestic help office under the guise of a cleaning company and used in a suspected human trafficking scheme, the Interior Ministry announced yesterday. The man was arrested along with 26 helpers, all in violation of the residency law, from a hotel apartment in Salmiya. A point-of-sale machine and receipts were confiscated. All those involved were referred to concerned authorities, the ministry noted.
Last week, a local report indicated that the public prosecution ordered the arrest of several Kuwaiti citizens who brought in 400 expats of various nationalities to supposedly work at five "nonexistent" hotels, in what is considered the largest human trafficking case in the country. The prosecution's order was made after immigration detectives learned about the visas used to bring in workers for the bogus hotels.
The workers confessed to paying KD 1,500 each to come to Kuwait. Detectives were instructed to intensify their investigations after discovering the use of a Kuwaiti woman's signature, although she is out of the country for a long time, as documents were forged without her knowledge.