At about twenty past nine on the evening of August 15, 2009, a fire broke out in the women's tent at a wedding in Oyoun, in the Jahra governorate west of Kuwait City. The tent was pitched on a small patch of land between buildings, did not meet fire safety regulations, and had one small exit. Within about three minutes the whole structure was burning, and the crowd of women and children inside stampeded toward the only way out. Fifty-seven people died and about ninety were injured, the worst civilian disaster in Kuwait's modern history. Several of the dead were Saudi nationals or stateless Arabs, and many were so badly burned that they had to be identified by DNA and dental records. Among the dead, according to later accounts, were the new bride's mother and sister and at least seven children.
The wedding was the groom's second. His first wife, Nasra Yussef Mohammed al-Enezi, twenty-three, with whom he had two children, was arrested the next day. Early reports described her as his former wife; her lawyers said she was still married to him. According to the Kuwaiti press, she told interrogators that she had set the fire in revenge on her husband for taking a new wife and on her sisters-in-law for ruining her married life, and that she wanted to burn her husband's heart. She said she had taken a taxi, bought petrol in a bottle and gone to the tent.
In court she denied it. At her first hearing in October 2009 she pleaded not guilty, and she later said that what she had poured on the tent was cursed water, in a black magic ritual, and not petrol. Her lawyer, Zaid al-Khabbaz, argued that her confession had been made under duress, that the witnesses contradicted one another, and that she should not have been charged with murder because she had meant only to ruin the party. In November Judge Adel al-Sager ordered psychiatric tests after the defense said she had suffered unspecified mental disorders as a child, and summoned her husband and her Asian domestic worker. The maid testified that she saw al-Enezi pour a flammable liquid over the tent and start the fire. The defense also alleged that she had been two months pregnant at her arrest and that the pregnancy had been deliberately ended in custody.
On March 30, 2010, the Court of First Instance, sitting as Judges Adel al-Sager, Ahmad Abu al-Amayem and Khalid Abdul Hadi, convicted her of premeditated murder and starting a fire with intent to kill and sentenced her to death. She was not in court. Khabbaz said the verdict had been shaped by public opinion. The Court of Appeals upheld the sentence, and on June 12, 2011, the Court of Cassation did the same, the first time Kuwait's highest court had confirmed a death sentence on a female citizen. "Everyone says she must die," Khabbaz said.
The fire led to a government crackdown on illegally pitched tents and to an argument across the country about polygamy, the position of first wives and the safety of the celebration tents that are part of Kuwaiti weddings. The sentence then waited on the Emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, who could confirm or commute it.
He did not commute it. On January 25, 2017, al-Enezi was hanged at the Central Prison, one of seven people executed in Kuwait that day.