Cairo: An Egyptian man has admitted to chopping to death his wife and their four children in the province of Fayoum, south of Cairo, security sources said.
The 38-year-old schoolteacher turned himself over to the police and admitted he murdered them with a cleaver in their home.
The victims were the 33-year-old wife and children aged 11, eight, four and 18 months.
When police force went to the family’s home, they found the five bodies scattered on beds and the cleaver stained with blood, the sources added. The five had fatal skull fractures.
The man gave conflicting accounts about the motive for the murder, the sources said.
Initially, he claimed to have killed his family to protect them from threats of rape and death allegedly made by his partners in an unlawful artefact business.
Later, he attributed the murder to his wish to save his family from financial woes after he became ridden by debt.
“I was afraid the creditors will chase me and send me to jail,” private newspaper Al Masry Al Youm quoted him as telling investigators. “So, I decided to kill them so that they would not be driven out to the street as homeless after me,” he added.
Prosecutors ordered the man be kept in police custody for four days pending further questioning.
In recent years, conservative Egypt has been shocked by a string of multiple murders involving the family head.
In March, an Egyptian court sentenced a doctor to death for killing his wife and three children.
A month later, another court condemned to death a man after convicting him of having killed his two children by throwing them in the Nile under the influence of drugs.
