15-year sentence upheld for man convicted of murdering sister

AMMAN — The Cassation Court has upheld a December Criminal Court ruling sentencing a 30-year-old man to 15 years in prison after convicting him of the premeditated murder of his older sister in Madaba in May 2015.

The Criminal Court had found the man guilty of the premeditated murder of his 40-year-old sister, a mother of nine children, on May 14, and sentenced him to death.

However, the sentence was immediately reduced to 15 years because the victim’s family dropped the charges against him.

Court papers said the victim was working as a sanitation employee at a health centre in Madaba around one year before the incident.

However, the convicted man, who resided in Mafraq, and his brothers, opposed her work “because they believed it was shameful for her to work, but she did not listen to them”, the court verdict said.

On the day of the murder, the court maintained, “the defendant drove from Mafraq to Madaba in the early hours and waited for his sister. When he saw her leaving her house to go to work he shot her with a machinegun”.

“The victim called her son and informed him that the defendant shot her and was rushed to a nearby hospital, but she died shortly afterwards,” the court said.

The suspect turned himself in briefly after the incident, the court verdict added.

The victim received one fatal bullet to the stomach that caused her death, one bullet to the thigh and three other bullet wounds on her body, according to a government autopsy.

The Cassation Court, which issued its ruling earlier in the month, ruled that the Criminal Court’s ruling falls within the law, that the proceedings were proper and that the sentence given was satisfactory.

The Cassation Court tribunal comprised judges Yassin Abdullat, Mohammad Tarawneh, Daoud Tubeileh, Hussein Sakran and Basem Mubeidin.