Man charged manslaughter in alleged stabbing death of brother

AMMAN — The Criminal Court prosecutor on Wednesday charged a man with manslaughter in connection with the stabbing death of his sibling earlier in the month in the Jordan Valley, senior official sources said.

The suspect reportedly placed his sibling’s “body in a barrel behind their home and set it on fire to conceal the murder”, a senior judicial source said.

The suspect was arrested on Monday after police received a tip-off that he reportedly “stabbed his brother almost three weeks ago following a heated argument”, the senior judicial source told The Jordan Times.

“The suspect confessed to murdering his brother after witnessing an assault by the victim against their mother,” according to the senior judicial source.

In his initial testimony to police, the suspect claimed that he saw his brother “stabbing their mother in the head following a heated argument, which made him really angry”, said the senior judicial source, who is close to the investigations.

The suspect stated that “he took his mother to the bathroom to clean her wound then went back to the room where his sibling was and stabbed him to death”, the judicial source added.

The suspect then “grabbed his brother’s body outside the house, placed it in a barrel and set it on fire,” the judicial source maintained.

“The suspect informed his mother that the victim had left the house to an unknown destination,” a second senior source told The Jordan Times.

However, the murder was exposed when police received a tip-off that the victim “was murdered by the suspect,” the second source said without further elaboration.

Criminal Court Prosecutor Salah Taleb supervised the examination of the remains at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, the second source added.

“Taleb ordered that samples taken from the charred body to be sent to criminal lab for DNA testing and to determine the cause of death,” according to the second source.

Meanwhile, the suspect was ordered detained at a correctional and rehabilitation centre pending further investigations.