Hong Kong - An Indonesian maid began an eight-month jail term Saturday after putting bleach in a baby girl's milk as revenge for being sacked. Muhari Lismiwati, 30, put a drop of bleach into the milk she was preparing for the 9-month-old girl in March, one day before she was due to leave her job.
The infant's mother fed a small amount to the infant who vomited and resisted attempts to feed her more. She then opened the bottle and smelled a strong smell of bleach.
The mother called police and Lismiwati was arrested. The baby was admitted to hospital with a reddish throat and discharged the following day, Hong Kong's Tuen Mun Court heard Friday.
The maid admitted squeezing a drop of bleach into the milk from a cleaning cloth. Tests found there was less than one millilitre of bleach in the milk, enough to cause vomiting.
Lismiwati, who had worked for the family for two months, got on her knees in court to apologize to the mother.
She admitted a charge of administering poison with intent to injure and was jailed by magistrate Douglas Kwok who described her actions as "evil."
More than 200,000 women from Indonesia and the Philippines work as live-in domestic helpers for Hong Kong families, earning a government-set minimum wage of around 460 US dollars a month.
