Death penalty for Qatari man guilty of British teacher murder
A Qatari man, Badr Hashem Khamis Abdallah, has been sentenced to death by a Doha court for the murder of British teacher Lauren Patterson.
Another man, Mohamed Abdallah Hassan Abdul Aziz, was also sentenced to three years in prison for helping the first to burn Patterson’s body, as well as damaging and erasing evidence.
Both men were arrested after the 24-year-old’s smoldering remains were found by campers outside of Doha in October last year, shortly after she had gone missing.
During the trial, a friend of Patterson’s testified that the four had left a nightclub at La Cigale hotel together, and that the men dropped her home with the promise that they would also drop Patterson off shortly after.
The prosecutor sought the death penalty for the first defendant during the trial, calling Patterson’s death “heinous, foreign and shocking to a society as conservative as Qatar’s.”
The defense had maintained that Patterson’s death had been an accident, and said confessions obtained from the two men on trial were coerced.
Justified