Carpenter charged with rape, murder of his teenage daughter

The Jordan Times, by Rana Husseini

AMMAN - The criminal prosecutor on Sunday charged a 45-year-old carpenter with the rape and murder of his teenage daughter in Zarqa, official sources said.

The father, who was not identified by officials, was also charged with performing an abortion on his daughter.

The suspect reportedly headed to a police station in the early hours of Sunday, claiming to have killed his 19-year-old daughter, a senior judicial source said.

“The father stunned officers on duty by informing them that he had been raping his daughter since she was 15-years-old,” the source told The Jordan Times.

In his initial testimony to the police, the suspect said he discovered that his daughter was over five months pregnant with his child and decided to perform an abortion to get rid of the foetus.

“The suspect brought a carpet cutter, cut his daughter’s stomach with it, opened her womb and took out the female foetus and threw it in the garbage,” the source said, quoting the suspect.

He then sewed up his daughter’s stomach with thread, but could not stop her bleeding and she died, the source added.

“When he found out that she had died, he immediately headed to the nearest police station and turned himself in and confessed to the rape and abortion,” the source added.

A team of government pathologists headed by Ibrahim Obeidat, and included Zeid Azzeh and Mohammad Erteimat, performed autopsies on the girl and the foetus.

They established that the girl died of internal bleeding, while the 37-week-old foetus died as a result of the abortion.

Another source told The Jordan Times that the victim’s mother knew that her daughter was being raped for years, but kept quiet about it because her husband had threatened to kill her and the girl.

“We have assumed that the daughter kept quiet about the sexual assault out of fear that her father might kill her,” the source said.

The victim is survived by a 17-year-old sister and a 10-year-old brother.

Momen Hadidi, chief medical examiner at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, expressed shock over the incident, noting that it is a “wake-up call for us to focus more on early detection of social disorders in our society”.

“I have been a pathologist for 30 years and this is the first time I have come across such a horrific story,” he told The Jordan Times.

Hadidi, who is also an expert in family protection affairs, said the focus needs to be on early intervention and detection of family abuse to prevent the recurrence of such appalling, but isolated, incidents.

“This incident is a clear indication of certain disorders in some families and we need to work harder to provide more counselling and help for individuals who suffer from sexual abuse within the family,” he said.

Dead woman identified

Meanwhile, police on Sunday identified a woman whose badly decomposing body was found in a deserted building in Jabal Amman over the weekend, according to officials.

Relatives of the 28-year-old woman contacted the police on Sunday after reading in the local press that the body of a woman was found in a building on Rainbow Street.

“Her family, who reported her missing almost 10 days ago, identified her at the morgue as their missing daughter,” Police Spokesperson Major Mohammad Khatib said.

Her father claimed that his daughter was suffering from mental problems and would often run away from home to unknown locations, a second source told The Jordan Times.

Khatib said it was too early to determine how the woman died, adding the final conclusion “will all depend on the forensic laboratory examinations”.