Alleged Balqa suicide discovered to be homicide
AMMAN — Authorities on Sunday said a government autopsy and police efforts had led them to discovering the homicide of a teenage girl in Balqa Governorate over the weekend.
The family of a 13-year-old girl on Saturday night took their dead “teenage daughter to hospital claiming that she had hanged herself”, Police Spokesperson Lt. Col. Amer Sartawi said.
However, the hospital referred the victim’s body to the Balqa National Institute of Forensic Medicine for an autopsy, Sartawi told The Jordan Times.
Pathologists Ali Abbadi and Saeb Abu Aboud performed an autopsy on the victim and concluded it was a homicide, a senior medical source said.
“The pathologists detected an injury inside the neck which is not consistent with hanging, and determined that the girl was killed and alerted investigators,” the senior medical official told The Jordan Times.
Authorities summoned the victim’s family for questioning and after “confronting the father with the new evidence, he informed officials that his 16-year-old son was the perpetrator”, a senior official source said.
The father claimed in his initial testimony that the “victim refused a request related to house work, which prompted her older brother to squeeze her neck as a form of discipline but he ended up killing her”, the senior official source told The Jordan Times.
The family then tried to “cover up the incident by claiming that the teenager took her own life”, the senior official source added.
Police said they are still investigating the incident.