Cairo: An Egyptian court had sentenced a judge to death on charges of killing his wife, who was a TV host, in one of high-profile murder cases in the country, local media reported.
The Criminal Court in Giza delivered the initial death verdict against the defendant, named Ayman Abdul Fattah, and decided to refer it to Egypt’s leading Islamic official, the Mufti for approval, a routine legal procedure in death sentences in the country.
The court handed down a similar verdict to an accomplice in the same case and set September 11 as the date to pronounce a final verdict.
The judge and the co-defendant were arrested in July and were charged with murdering the TV host Shaima Jamal who was secretly married to the prime defendant. The woman’s body was found buried inside a farm in Giza..
During the trial, Abdul Fattah said he had killed Shaima allegedly in self-defence after she threatened him to go public with their marriage and demanded a large sum of money to agree to divorce without harming his reputation.
The murder surfaced amid other high-profile cases of violence against women in Egypt.
In June, a university student fatally stabbed his female colleague outside their university in the Delta province of Mansoura after she had snubbed his marriage proposal. The murderer was later sentenced to death.
A similar murder happened earlier this month in the city of Zagazig sparking fresh outrage in Egypt.
