The court of appeal had earlier maintained the lower court verdict sentencing the accused to five years imprisonment in addition to paying the victim’s heirs blood money.
An Arab man has been acquitted by the Abu Dhabi Court of Cassation of the charge of murdering his wife due to lack of tangible evidences.
The court of appeal had earlier maintained the lower court verdict sentencing the accused to five years imprisonment in addition to paying the victim’s heirs blood money.
The ruling handed down by the court of cassation has been based on lack of prosecution and defence witnesses.
The ruling was overruled twice before owing to formal reasons.
The case goes back to when a domestic dispute ensued between the accused and his pregnant wife. The husband suspected that the baby his wife was carrying was not his. The victim refused to undergo an abortion and called for her brother to resolve the dispute.
The victim insisted on having the baby, but asked for a divorce with certain conditions which made the husband more furious.
One morning, the accused murdered his wife by stabbing her in her chest, neck and abdomen. The baby was also killed in the process. The accused then stole his brother-in-law’s cell phone headed towards the airport in the victim’s car. He parked the car near Bani Yas and then hailed a cab to go to the airport and fled to Bahrain.
When the victim’s brother discovered his sister’s body, he called the police. The murderer was arrested at the Bahrain airport. The accused admitted to the charges during investigations conducted in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.
Al Dhafra criminal court of first instance then handed down capital punishment against him on the charge of premeditated murder. The court also sentenced him to five years more in jail for killing the child in the womb, and a year for stealing the mobile phone.
In its latest ruling, the court of cassation made it clear that the ruling passed by the appeal court convicting the accused of murder with malice due to the victim’s provocations, and dropping the capital punishment and replacing it with five years in jail were not based on any legal (Sharia) texts or provisions.
The court of cassation ruled that a court cannot drop capital punishment unless a victim’s next of kin forgives and absolves the murderer.
Further, the court of cassation said the appeals court’s ruling was not based on corroborate evidence. Two weapons were recovered from the crime scene, and the confessions made by the accused before the prosecution did not match the evidences in terms of the position of the victim when the dead body was found, the number of stabs the victim had received, and the fingerprints lifted from the victim’s car. The ruling also disregarded the fact that the victim’s brother sustained injuries in his hands and forehead.
The ruling passed by the lower courts, according to the court of cassation, did not provide legal evidence that the accused himself had committed the crime.
