Man charged with rape, premeditated murder of Syrian child

AMMAN — The Criminal Court prosecutor on Saturday night charged a 30-year-old man with premeditated murder and rape in connection with the “brutal” killing of a Syrian child in an Amman neighbourhood over the weekend, official sources said.

The victim’s body was found by a cleaning employee in a deserted building on Friday in Nuzha suburb naked and with his throat slit, Police Spokesperson Lt. Col. Amer Sartawi said.

The body showed traces of sexual assault and stains of paint were found on his hands, the police official added.

The suspect, who is a next door neighbour to the victim and worked as a painter on construction sites, was arrested after police became suspicious that “he could have been the one who sexually assaulted and murdered the child”, a senior judicial source said.

 “Police conducted a routine questioning with the suspect and took DNA swabs from him,” a judicial source close to the investigations told The Jordan Times.

In the meantime, the judicial source added, investigators combed the deserted area where the child’s body was found and collected evidence that tied the suspect to the incident.

 “Investigators went to the suspect’s house and arrested him, and, when they placed him in the patrol vehicle, he said that he did it and that his conscience was troubling him,” the judicial source stated.

In his initial testimony to Criminal Court Prosecutor Issam Haddidi, the suspect said that “he decided to rape the child and lured him into the deserted building”.

 “The suspect knocked the boy’s head against the wall so he could control him and sodomised him in a savage manner. He  then slit his throat with a sharp object,” the source said, quoting the suspect’s initial confessions.

The suspect then reportedly took the child’s clothes and the sharp object and left. On the way, he reportedly “dumped the weapon and the child’s clothes in a trash dumpster”, according to the source.

The child’s identity was revealed after investigators scanned missing persons’ files and discovered that the child was reported missing by his mother on Thursday.

His family later identified him as their missing son when police showed them a photo of the child.

A postmortem conducted by a team of government pathologists indicated that the “child was brutally sodomised and that he also suffered from brain hemorrhage”, a second source told The Jordan Times.

Investigations are still ongoing in the case. “We are still examining the crime scene and will re-question the suspect again to determine if there are other accomplices,” a senior source said.

In the meantime, residents of Nuzha suburb took to the street on Saturday night when the authorities escorted the suspect to reenact the murder, the senior source said.

“Hundreds of angry people gathered and prevented us from approaching the scene of the murder, demanding to execute the suspect in the place where he reportedly committed the murder,” the senior source told The Jordan Times.

As a result, the source maintained, Haddidi decided “against the re-enactment of the murder for the time being, due to safety reasons”.