Egypt judicial shocker

Wow. I return home to the news that Hisham Talaat Moustafa and his alleged confederate were sentenced to death for the murder of Moustafa’s Lebanese pop star mistress in Dubai last July. He developed my ex-neighborhood El Rehab City, and was so powerful and well-connected here that I think most of us assumed he’d get off somehow (especially since Egypt refused to extradite him to the UAE for trial).

Judges in Egypt are often quite independent, and have done a number of brave things. (I don’t know enough about this case to be sure that this was especially brave; it may be that his connections had soured on him anyway. But it’s certainly a surprise to me.) It was an awfully brutal crime.

The hit man he hired was a security officer at the Four Seasons Hotel, a place very familiar to all of us in this city as well, which brings this lurid case pretty close to home.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/21/suzanne-tamim-slaying-egy_n_206177.html