United Arab Emirates Executed Woman Convicted of Killing American Teacher in 2014
The United Arab Emirates has executed a woman convicted of killing an American teacher at a shopping mall in Abu Dhabi last year.
Ala’a Al-Hashemi, a 31-year old Emirati woman, was convicted of stabbing 47-year old mother-of-three Ibolya Ryan in 2014. As reported by the New York Daily News, the murdered schoolteacher’s 11-year-old twin boys were waiting for her outside the mall bathroom when she was randomly attacked by Al-Hashemi, who was cloaked at the time of the attack.
“It was clearly a random thing,” Ryan’s ex-husband Paul Ryan said on NBC’s “Today” show, “The boys didn’t realize what had happened and did not hear their mother crying for help.”
As reported by CNN, surveillance video of the mall showed a veiled figure identified as the attacker walking into the center and then running to an elevator and exiting the mall.
Two months before Ryan's murder the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi issued a statement warning U.S. citizens of an anonymous Internet post that had encouraged attacks directed against teachers at American as well as other international schools.
Aside of Ryan's murder, Al-Hashemi stood accused of making a bomb and of planting it outside an apartment building where it failed to go off. According to the state-run WAM news agency, authorities had accused Al-Hashemi of providing financial support to unspecified terror organizations and of using social media to "disseminate activities of the terrorist organizations."
Al-Hashemi -- who was also convicted of setting up a social media account to spread militant ideology with the intention of undermining the government and giving money to Yemen’s Al Qaeda organization for the funding of attacks -- was sentenced to death two weeks ago.
As reported by Gulf News, she was executed by a firing squad.
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