Court upholds jail term for killer

Three-year sentence upheld for Emirati who mistakenly believed his child was having an affair.

ABU DHABI // A criminal court was correct in not sentencing to death an Emirati man who killed his daughter, the Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.

The judgment upholds the Sharia tenet that children cannot cause the death of their parents.

The man's wife, who is the victim's stepmother, had told him his daughter had been sleeping away from home for a week. The father said he killed the girl for reasons of honour after he found her at her uncle's house.

However, a post-mortem examination found she was a virgin, and investigations showed she had left the house only two hours before her father found and killed her.

The father was sentenced to three years in prison by the Criminal Court of First Instance. Prosecutors appealed against the verdict, seeking a harsher sentence.

Under Sharia, because a parent is the cause of a child's existence, the child cannot be the cause of the parent's death, a judicial source said.

A similar verdict was issued recently in the case of a Pakistani man who killed his daughter after her stepmother claimed she had seen her in a "scandalous" position with a man.

The daughter denied the accusation and said it was she who had caught her stepmother in a compromising position, and that the stepmother was retaliating. The father did not believe the daughter and killed her.

After medical tests showed she was a virgin, the father suffered a heart attack. He pleaded with the court to sentence him to death so he could be rid of his guilt, but the court said it could not overrule the law.