The Alexandria Appeals Court decided on Tuesday to begin the trial of the defendant facing charges of slaughtering a Coptic alcohol merchant next February. The trial will be held at the Alexandria Criminal Court, where the defendant faces charges of first premeditated murder.
According to the state-run media outlet Egy News, the Alexandria prosecution decided to refer the defendant to criminal court over accusations of deliberate murder and the possession of a knife.
Investigations revealed that the accused man, named Adel Soliman, confessed that he deliberately slaughtered the Coptic alcohol merchant named Youssef Lamaei while sitting in front of his store in Sidi Beshr in Alexandria.
“He [the defendant] clearly admitted that he intended to kill the store’s owner in retaliation to his [the store’s owner] business selling alcohol,” Egy News reported. “Moreover, he said that he had previously asked the store owner to stop selling alcohol as a warning.”
The defendant asserted that he procured a knife to carry out the murder and concealed it in his clothes and monitored the store owner two hours before the murder.
The incident took place at the start of January. Security forces later arrested the suspect who was identified by CCTV footage from cameras placed in the store.
The defendant was arrested while he was hiding in the Bakous suburb of Alexandria, and is currently being subjected to investigation, according to state-run newspaper Al-Ahram.
The murder occurred when Youssef Lamaei, a Coptic alcohol merchant in the suburb of Sidi Beshr in Alexandria, was murdered by an unidentified man while he sat in front of his store. Security cameras in the store caught the incident on tape.
