KUWAIT CITY, Nov 24, 2009 (AFP) - A Kuwaiti woman charged with starting a fire at a wedding party that killed 55 women and children must undergo psychiatric tests, a judge ruled on Tuesday.
The decision came after defence lawyers said the woman, accused of setting a wedding tent ablaze after the man she had married took another wife, had suffered unspecified mental disorders when she was a child.
Judge Adel al-Sager also agreed to summon the woman's husband and an Asian maid who said she saw her starting the fire to testify at the next hearing on December 8.
But he turned down a request by 23-year-old Nasra Yussef Mohammad al-Enezi's defence lawyers, Zaid al-Khabbaz and Saqqaf al-Saqqaf, to free on bail the woman who faces a premeditated murder charge.
The lawyers said there had been "contradictions" in the accounts given by the defendant's husband and the Asian maid to the public prosecutor.
Khabbaz told AFP that the woman was at a police station in a different location when the fire broke out.
In the first hearing last month, Nasra denied the charges. On Tuesday, she was present in the courtroom but was not asked to speak.
The August 15 inferno engulfed the women-and-children-only tent in minutes and triggered a stampede.
In the first hearing, defence lawyers alleged Nasra was two months pregnant when arrested and was "deliberately aborted" by a prison guard with the help of an Asian nurse.
The woman is charged with "premeditated murder and starting a fire with the intent to kill," for which she faces the death penalty under Kuwaiti law.
oh/ak/hc
Copyright AFP 2009.
