DailyStar

BEIRUT: A Kenyan maid was badly injured Monday after a rope she was using to escape from her employer’s third floor apartment snapped.

The rope failed after the woman made it about two-thirds the way down the building in the Nabatieh village of Zibdin in southern Lebanon, according to local news agency Elnashra.

The report said she suffered several bone fractures and was being treated at Nabih Berri Governmental University Hospital in Nabatieh.

The report did not identify the worker, but said she worked for a Lebanese woman with the initials A.M.

It is not uncommon for Lebanese employers to lock their domestic workers inside their homes. The workers resort to tying bed sheets and towels together to scale down buildings to escape abusive employers.

About 200,000 foreign domestic workers are employed in Lebanon under the much-criticized sponsorship system. Human Rights Watch and other organizations have called on Lebanese authorities to address the “high levels of abuse and deaths” of maids in the country.

HRW in 2008 recorded an average of one maid death a week in Lebanon by unnatural causes, including suicides.