A Muslim woman of Egyptian descent was brutally killed in cold-blood in a Dresden courtroom. The victim was in court to follow litigation procedures against her attacker when she was brutally murdered.
Thousands of Egyptian mourners marched behind the coffin of the “martyr of the head scarf” – a pregnant Muslim woman who was stabbed to death in a Dresden courtroom on Wednesday in front of her young son.
Many in her homeland were outraged by the attack and saw the low-key response in Germany as an example of racism and anti-Muslim sentiment.
The woman’s husband was critically wounded in the attack, after he tried to intervene and was stabbed by the attacker and accidentally shot by court security.
“There is no God but God and the Germans are the enemies of God,” chanted mourners for 32-year-old Marwa el-Sherbini in Alexandria, where her body was buried.
“We will avenge her killing,” her brother Tarek el-Sherbini told the Associated Press by telephone from the mosque where prayers were being recited in front of his sister’s coffin. “In the west, they don’t recognise us. There is racism.”
Sherbini, a pharmacist who was four months’ pregnant and wore the Islamic head scarf, was involved in a court case against her neighbour after he called her a terrorist. She was due to testify when he stabbed her 18 times inside the courtroom in front of her three-year-old son.
The neighbour, who has only been identified as 28-year-old Alex W, remains in detention and prosecutors have opened an investigation on suspicion of murder.
The prosecutor, Christian Avenarius, said: “It was very clearly a xenophobic attack of a fanatical lone wolf.”
A German government spokesman, Thomas Steg, said that if the attack was racist, the government “naturally condemns this in the strongest terms”.
For more details follow the links
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/07/muslim-woman-shot-germany-court
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090703-20359.html
