DUBAI– Sajjad Hussein had spent nearly twenty years in the UAE building a life one brick at a time. A construction worker from Pakistan, he had learned the rhythms of the Gulf — the heat, the long hours, the quiet pride of sending money home. When his son Mohammad Arshman was born after five years of marriage, something shifted in him. The child was not just a son. He was the proof that the sacrifice had been worth it.
Arshman was two years old. He had a two-month-old sister. He had his whole life ahead of him.
Then, on an ordinary afternoon in a residential building in Sharjah, his mother stepped inside the apartment for less than a minute. One minute. Sixty seconds in which everything a family had built collapsed beyond recovery.
“It took less than one minute for our lives to change forever,” Hussein would later say, his voice barely holding.
What the Cameras Saw
The building’s CCTV footage told a story that residents, investigators, and the child’s own father have since described in shattered fragments. The footage showed two young girl neighbours — believed to be around ten years old — playing with Arshman in the corridor outside the family’s apartment.
Then, one of the girls opened the staircase door and called the toddler over, beckoning with her hand in a gesture that Hussein, upon watching the footage, could only describe in one way: “like a mother calling a child to come closer.” The boy, trusting, hurried toward her.
The door closed behind them. One girl was seen placing her hand over her ear before running away. The other emerged, shook her hands, and walked calmly down the corridor.
Moments later, screams began echoing through the building. The watchman, thinking at first there was a quarrel near the lift, checked floor by floor until he reached the ground floor and found Arshman’s mother crying and calling for help. The boy had fallen nearly fourteen metres from a window opening near the third-floor staircase.
He did not survive.
“When I checked the cameras, I saw something I could not imagine,” the watchman told Gulf News. “I informed the police straight away.”
A Community in Shock
Police officers, CID investigators, and forensic teams spent hours at the building. Child protection authorities were notified. The parents of both girls were taken into custody — a step that legal experts said was consistent with UAE law, under which parents bear responsibility for the actions of children below the age of eleven.
Advocate Preeta Sriram Madav, who provided initial legal advice to the families, confirmed that the custody of the parents was linked directly to this principle. Days later, both sets of parents were released on bail. The girls themselves remained under the care of the Child Protection Department as investigations continued.
When, Dubai-based daily Gulf News visited the building, residents described an atmosphere of grief and disbelief. One of the fathers had returned briefly on a Monday night, then moved out temporarily. The other family had not come back at all.
“There is mental trauma for everyone involved,” one resident said quietly. “The parents of the little boy, the girls, and their families.”
The two girls, according to those who saw them in the immediate aftermath, had appeared calm. They were running around normally, residents said, as if nothing had happened. That detail, more than anything else, has stayed with people — not as evidence of malice so much as a window into how incompletely children sometimes grasp what their actions mean.
A Question No One Can Fully Answer
What happened in that stairwell remains, in many ways, opaque. Authorities have said the motive is still unclear. The girls are minors. The full circumstances are still being investigated.
What is clear is this: a family that came to the Gulf seeking a better life has been destroyed. A father has returned to Pakistan carrying footage in his memory that he cannot unsee. A mother stepped away for one minute — the kind of pause that every parent takes a hundred times a day — and came back to a world she will never fully recover from.
In a Sharjah apartment building, a toddler’s death in a stairwell has shattered three families and raised troubling questions about child safety, supervision, and the fragile trust that holds expatriate communities together.
Child safety experts and legal observers have been quick to note that incidents of this nature, while rare, expose gaps that are easy to overlook in the dense, vertical living environments of Gulf cities. Apartment corridors, stairwells, and shared spaces are often treated as extensions of the home — places where children play, where doors stay open, where neighbours are assumed to be safe. That assumption, while usually correct, carries a risk that is easy to underestimate.
Advocate Preeta framed it carefully: the case, she said, is a reminder for parents to remain vigilant and pay close attention to their children’s safety — not as a rebuke to Arshman’s parents, who could not have anticipated what happened, but as a sober recognition that public shared spaces demand a different kind of awareness.
What Remains
Hussein has said he plans to return to the UAE within one or two months. What he will return to is unclear — whether he will go back to the same building, the same job, the same rhythms that once gave his life shape.
He has appealed to other parents in the expatriate community to stay alert, to watch closely, to resist the temptation to trust the corridor, the landing, the shared lift lobby as if they were the safety of one’s own four walls.
“Every time I remember the video, I break down,” he said.
Arshman was born after five years of waiting. He was two years old. He had a sister who is two months old and will grow up without ever knowing her brother’s voice.
In a building in Sharjah, three families — Pakistani, Indian, and one more — are now bound together by a tragedy none of them asked for, and none of them can undo. The girls are in care. Their parents are home on bail. And a father is somewhere in Pakistan, trying to find a way to go on living.
The cameras recorded everything. But there are things no camera can capture: the weight of a minute, the cost of a second’s trust, the silence that follows when a corridor that felt like home becomes the place where everything ended.
Reporting based on local English Dailies in the UAE
