"Too Westernized" Girl Dies after Father Runs Her Over in Honor Killing, Say Police
PHOENIX (CBS/AP) Twenty-year-old Noor Faleh Almaleki's fight for life ended Monday despite emergency spinal surgery and doctors' desperate two week effort to save her life while she lay in a coma.
Police say her father, Iraqi immigrant Faleh Hassan Almaleki, ran her over Oct. 20 in a parking lot in a Phoenix suburb because he felt she had become "too Westernized." He also ran over her boyfriend's mother Amal Khalaf. She is expected to survive.
Police have called it an honor killing.
The 48-year-old father fled after the attack eventually landing in the United Kingdom.
Authorities there denied him entrance. He was sent to Atlanta, where he was arrested.
Peoria, Ariz., police interviewed him and brought him back to Arizona over the weekend, but have declined to release what Almaleki said to them.
At a court hearing over the weekend in Phoenix, county prosecutor Stephanie Low told a judge that Almaleki admitted to committing the crime.
"By his own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family," Low said. "This was an attempt at an honor killing."
Family members had told police that Almaleki attacked his daughter because he believed she had become "too Westernized" and was not living according to his traditional Iraqi values.
Almaleki, wearing a jail uniform, said only his name and birth date during the hearing. He has declined requests to be interviewed.
Almaleki had faced charges of aggravated assault, but Peoria police spokesman Mike Tellef said the charges will be upgraded in light of Noor Faleh Almaleki's death.
Police said the Almalekis moved to Peoria from Iraq in the mid-1990s.
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