Mystery shrouds injury of Bahraini school kid

Manama : Mystery shrouds the injury of the two-year-old girl whose shoulder was fractured in a nursery school a few days ago. Doctors said that the girl’s injury will take at least a year to heal completely.

The mother of Fatima, who was injured while at a private nursery school in the Capital on Thursday, claims that the educators at the school hid the truth about her daughter’s injury and delayed her treatment.

Um Fatima said while speaking to DT News yesterday, “A pediatric orthopedic examined Fatima today (Sunday) and he rubbished the allegations of the school stating that my daughter took a tumble of the bottom part of a slide in the school’s playground. After examining the bruise on the back of her shoulder, the doctor insisted that she must have fallen from at least half a meter height. This raises more questions about what really happened to my daughter that day.”

“The doctor told us that the fractured bone may heal soon, but the swelling will take around a year to come back to normal. He also noticed that she’s not in a good psychological shape and that she’s unusually terrified for a child her age,” Um Fatima said.

The mother said that she is insisting on the legal procedures against the school as she claims that they weren’t cooperative with her and are “hiding the facts” about the incident from her. DT News reported earlier that Um Fatima lodged a complaint against the school at Nabih Saleh Police Station in the Capital Governorate. She did this after the school didn’t inform her about her only child’s injury, kept her for a couple of hours without receiving any medical attention and apparently rejected the mother’s repeated requests to have access to the recordings of surveillance cameras inside the school. The mother also hired an attorney to follow up on the legal procedures she had initiated against the school.

Um Fatima initially pleaded to the authorities on social media networks, seeking justice. Few hours later, Labour and Social Development Minister Jameel Humaidan instructed the concerned departments in the ministry, which is in charge of nursery schools, to launch an immediate probe into the details of the incident. The ministry said on its official page on Instagram that it’s currently investigating the matter and will take the necessary procedures against the school if negligence of the child was proved.  

The mother added, “We’re now having doubts about what happened. The school first denied that anything happened to my daughter. Later they said she took a tumble from the slide. Then they persistently refused providing us with the security cameras footage, claiming that they haven’t been recording since last month. The doctor’s opinion is quite shocking and there’s a possibility that my daughter was mistreated or abused, especially that no witnesses were there as my daughter was under the supervision of one educator and not two as ordinary.”