Doha // A court yesterday upheld the death penalty in the retrial of a Qatari man convicted of killing a British teacher.
Badr Al Jabr was found guilty of stabbing Lauren Patterson, 24, and burning her body in the Qatari desert in October 2013.
“The defendant was fully aware of the consequences of his actions,” Doha’s court of cassation ruled.
It said Al Jabr, who was not in court, would face the death penalty, the verdict given in 2014.
The use of capital punishment is rare in Qatar. The last case of the death penalty being carried out was in 2003.
The judge said that any death penalty would be carried out by hanging or shooting.
Ms Patterson’s mother, Alison, who has regularly travelled to the Arabian Gulf for hearings, was in court yesterday.
She wept as details of the crime were read out, and afterwards hugged family members and friends who were present.
This month, she said before the same court that she did not want to forgive Al Jabr, although she had previously said that she did not believe in capital punishment.
Al Jabr had been convicted of the murder and sentenced to death, but that ruling was quashed, prompting yesterday’s retrial. In a lengthy verdict read out in court on Sunday, the judge dismissed all aspects of Al Jabr’s defence.
The defence argued at various times that he had acted in self-defence, was mentally incapable at the time of the murder, was interrogated by police without a lawyer and that the young teacher had committed suicide.
But the judge said “several consequential strands of evidence” pointed to Al Jabr’s guilt.
He recounted how the Qatari and the British teacher had met at a central Doha hotel.
They then left the hotel and went back to a property owned by Al Jabr, where they had sex, said the judge.
Previous court evidence had heard the schoolteacher had been sexually assaulted.
It was afterwards that Al Jabr attacked Patterson, a teacher in Qatar from Kent in southeast England, stabbing her with a knife which had a 20-centimetre blade, the court heard.
Her body was then taken to the desert and burned on charcoal bricks.
Patterson’s remains were discovered several hours later by members of a local tribe, alerted by the smell of the burning, the court was told.
Al Jabr’s accomplice Mohamed Abdallah Hassan Abdul Aziz, who helped to burn the body, was previously sentenced to three years in jail.
The Briton’s murder was one of two high-profile cases involving Western teachers in Qatar in recent years.
In 2012, Jennifer Brown, a newly-arrived US teacher from Pennsylvania, was murdered by a Kenyan security guard, Alvine Moseti Anyona, who is now serving life in prison
*Agence France-Presse