BERLIN: The man on trial for murdering pregnant Egyptian Marwa El-Sherbini in Germany in a frenzied anti-Islamic attack, is suicidal, his mother said in a press interview on Sunday.
“He no longer wants to live, Larissa Wiens told the mass-circulation Bild am Sonntag newspaper. “He says: ‘In a computer game you can press reset and start all over again. But not in real life.’
The paper cites a policeman as saying that Russian-born Alex Wiens, 28, said when he was arrested after the murder of Marwa El-Sherbini on July 1: “Please shoot me.
Wiens, who went on trial on October 26 facing life in prison for murder, is accused of stabbing the headscarfed Sherbini, 31, repeatedly with an 18-centimeter kitchen knife in a courtroom in Dresden.
She bled to death at the scene watched by her son Mustafa, then three and a half, and her husband in what prosecutors say was a killing motivated by “a pronounced hatred of non-Europeans and Muslims.
Egyptian media quickly dubbed her “the veil martyr. The attack, as well as a slow reaction by Germany’s media and political class, triggered anti-German feeling in Egypt and in the wider Muslim world.
The accused is also charged with attempting in the same incident to kill her husband, Elwy Okaz, who was shot in the leg by a confused police officer who apparently mistook him to be the assailant.
Sherbini had just testified against Wiens at a defamation trial for calling her a “terrorist , an “Islamist and a “whore in an earlier dispute in a playground near where they both lived.
“Alex must have got his image of Islam, his hate, from television, Larissa Wiens, 55, told Bild. “I am so sorry for this woman, for her unborn child, for her son who had to watch it all happen.
A verdict is expected on November 11. -AFP
