Jordanian man charged with rape, murder in horror abortion case

May 24, 2010, 12:19 GMT

Amman - A Jordanian carpenter was charged Monday with raping his teenage daughter and then killing her during a botched Caesarean section to terminate a child he had fathered with her, the Jordan Times reported.

'The suspect brought a carpet cutter, cut his daughter's stomach with it, opened her womb and took the female foetus and threw it in the garbage,' police sources told the paper.

He then sewed up his daughter's stomach with thread, but could not stop her bleeding. She eventually died.

The father, who was not identified, went to a police station in the city of Zarqa, 25 kilometres east of Amman, on Sunday, claiming to have killed his 19-year-old daughter. He told officers that he had been raping his daughter since she was 15.

The forensic authorities established that the girl died of internal bleeding, while the 37-week-old foetus died as a result of the abortion.

The victim's mother knew that her daughter was being raped for years but kept quiet about it because her husband had threatened to kill her and the girl, the paper quoted the sources as saying.

The chief medical examiner at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, Momen Hadidi, told the paper that it was the first time he had come across such 'a horrific story' in his 30 years as a pathologist.