Murder 'Was the Least She Deserved'

A couple of weeks ago we noted this gruesome honor killing in Iraq. Well, now this father of the year candidate claims he'd have slaughtered his daughter at birth if he knew what shame she'd have brought upon his family.

What a guy.

The Iraqi father who brutally murdered his teenage daughter in an "honour killing" for befriending a British soldier in Basra has said that he has no regrets, and that death "was the least she deserved".

Abdel-Qader Ali boasted that he would have slaughtered his 17-year-old daughter Rand at birth if he had know of the shame she would bring on him and his family.

He proudly told how his two sons helped with the murder, bragging that they were "men enough to help me end the life of someone who had just brought shame to our lives."

The 46-year-old father holds a key post in the Iraqi health ministry, and was quickly released from police custody following the murder because the officers who arrested him were full of praise for his actions.

Ali strangled and fatally stabbed his only daughter in March this year after a friend told him she had been seen speaking to the British soldier, whom she knew only as "Paul", at a local refugee charity in Basra where she worked as a volunteer.

Rand's heartbroken friends and colleagues and her grieving mother Layla - who is now living in hiding and facing death threats from the family - insist the young teenager's friendship with the British soldier was entirely innocent, and was little more than a teenage infatuation with a kindly stranger, who she met only four times, always in public.

Human rights group Amnesty claimed the horrifying case raised serious questions over the quality of policing and justice which British troops have left behind in Basra after five years of occupation.

But Abdel-Qader Ali, 46, was defiant when the Mail tracked him down to the family's neat, two-storey home in the Al-Fursi district of the city yesterday, claiming "God was blessing him" for his actions.

He said: "I don't have a daughter now, and prefer to say that I never had one.

"That girl humiliated me in front of my family and friends. Not satisfied with speaking to a foreign soldier, she lost the most precious thing for any woman."

His apparent accusation that Rand was sleeping with the British soldier - who has not been identified - is at odds with all other accounts of their friendship, as numerous witnesses claim she only ever spoke to him in public.

In an outburst which will horrify many in the West, Abdel-Qader Ali declared: "Death was the least she deserved.

"I have no regrets, and I had the support of all my friends who are fathers like me, and who know that what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours their religion.

"People from Western countries might be shocked, but our girls are not like their daughters who can sleep with any man they want and sometimes even get pregnant without marrying. Our girls should respect their religion, family and their body."

Ali went on: "I have only two boys from now on, and that girl was a mistake in my life.

"If I had known when she was born that this was the only benefit she would bring, I would have killed her the minute her mother pushed her from her womb.

"I know God [Allah] is blessing me for what I did.

An absolute monster.