WICKED FRIEND
Yin Sotheara, 34, had been playing cards with Meas Sovanna, 33, and other friends when she left the room at around midnight in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Yin then left the party and rode home on her motorcycle carrying the young girl, before getting a guilty conscience and dumping her back outside the home.
The kidnapper crept into the daughter’s bedroom and taped the girl’s mouth shut, wrapped her in a black bin bag and used a rope to lower her from the window to the ground.
Officers arrested mother-of-two Yin after the incident in March and last week she was found guilty of attempted murder.
The court heard how Yin, a widower, had been in debt and planned to use the baby to extort a ransom from the family.
She drove away from the home in the Sen Sok district of the city before receiving a frantic call from the girl’s worried parents. She returned at 4am with the baby hidden under the seat of her scooter.
Residents heard the girl crying later that day and found her among bags of rubbish and called police.
Yin was later arrested and confessed she had stolen the baby but claimed she had done it out of ‘love’ for the girl.
She told the trial: ‘I am completely obsessed with loving this baby and I had a rash idea.’
At the sentencing last Wednesday, Presiding Judge Top Chhun Heng described Yin as ‘brutal’ and said the baby could have been suffocated during the abduction.
Yin, 34 has been sentenced to 11years imprisonment.
Yin’s lawyers said they would appeal the ‘very strict’ sentence and claimed there was no evidence she had made attempts to kill the girl.
