The brutal killing of Lebanese diva Suzanne Tamim and the subsequent arrest of Egyptian property tycoon Hisham Talaat Moustafa on murder charges was very real, and shockwaves are already being felt in the corridors of power. Moustafa is a high-ranking government insider, a member of the ruling National Democratic party's "supreme policies council" and a personal friend of President Hosni Mubarak, whose regime has become notorious for its close links with rich businessmen.Egypt was astonished yesterday by an ending far stranger than fiction when Hisham Talaat Moustafa, a property tycoon, high-level political insider and friend of the President, was sentenced to hang for the killing of his former pop-star lover.
The Government quickly imposed a judicial ban on media discussion of the case, but that collapsed within weeks when it emerged that such a figure — Hisham Talaat Moustafa — had been arrested in connection with the crime.
It brings to an end a year-long episode that refocused attention on the Egyptian Government’s relationship with big business, its attempts to muzzle the press and a rather more basic discussion on private morals.
The murder of Suzanne Tamim, a 30-year-old Lebanese singer, created a tabloid sensation when photographs of her lying dead with her throat slashed appeared across the Middle East after her killing last July.
They claimed that Moustafa paid $2 million to Mohsen el-Sukkari, a former Egyptian police officer who became a hotel security guard, to follow his former lover from Egypt to London and on to Dubai.
Dubai policed solved the murder when they found Sukkari’s footprint at the scene and traced it back to him through the shop where he bought the shoes. Moustafa was arrested in September and stripped of his parliamentary immunity to face trial alongside Sukkari. Evidence for the prosecution included recordings of conversations between the two conspirators, taped by Sukkari. In one, Moustafa suggested that Ms Tamim should be thrown from a balcony or run over by a car.
Also submitted was CCTV footage of Sukkari entering and leaving the Dubai apartment on the morning of the murder. The police officer who interrogated Sukkari testified that he confessed that Moustafa had asked for his lover’s severed head to be delivered before he paid up.
The scene in the courtroom turned chaotic yesterday when judges announced convictions for both men and sentenced them to death. Moustafa’s two daughters burst into tears and his wife fainted as other members of his entourage grappled with photographers who rushed to the cage where the two men were being held.
Abdel Sattar Tamim, the dead singer’s father, said that the family was satisfied with the verdict and had “full faith” that it would be upheld.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6335993.ece
