A heartless father lies at the heart of this crime of passion, committed against his own daughter.
The 12-year-old victim was tortured to death by her father when he discovered that she had stolen LE 80 from his wallet.
Forensic reports revealed that he repeatedly poked her with a red-hot knife all over her body, perhaps deriving pleasure from her screams until she could scream no more.
The tragedy, however, began years ago, when the defendant divorced his wife and remarried, leaving his daughter (the victim) in her mother’s custody.
The little girl’s infrequent visits to her father were marred by run-ins with her stepmother who wanted to dominate the husband and remove her from the picture altogether.
One day the father returned from work only to find that the amount of money he had left inside his wallet was short LE 80. His wife denied she knew anything about the money, and told him to ask his daughter who, she said, was playing near his wallet.
Although the little girl denied taking it, her father found the full amount in the cupboard where she keeps her clothes. In a fit of rage, he assumed that his daughter was behind all the thefts that had occurred at his home recently, beating her and mutilating her mercilessly with a hot knife.
When he realized she was dead, he threw down the stairs then took her to hospital claiming that the girl had fallen down the stairs. When the forensic investigation confirmed that she was murdered, the father was arrested. At the prosecutor’s office, he confessed to his crime in a state of hysteria, unable to fathom what he had just done to his own flesh and blood.
