The police evidence photo shows Fatima Abdallah’s lifeless body on her brother’s new Tampa living room floor. She lived there in a gated subdivision, a private investigator says, with three other Muslim families, shunned and divorced because she could not produce children.
Conservative activist David Caton says he knows what it was.
“This was what you would call an honor killing,” he said.
Acting on neighbor tips and the private eye’s work, Caton, of the Florida Families Association is pushing police to reopen the case, insisting Abdallah died because her family believed she had dishonored them under Islamic law.
“She was divorced,” Caton says, “because she could not have children and was shunned and kept private into the family was not allowed to leave or go places.”
Yet the Hillsborough Medical Examiner ruled the 48-year-old Abdallah’s death was an accident, that during an argument with her mother, she threw herself to the floor, smashing her face into a coffee table, and dying of a brain hemorrhage.
Deputy Police Chief Marc Hamlin telling FOX13, “the bottom line is, no matter how long you investigate and no matter how much you investigate, its not going to overrule the competent medical evidence that it was an accident.”
Police across the country have been investigating so-called honor killings, where women and girls die at their own family’s hands for dishonoring them under Islamic law.
In Clayton County, outside Atlanta, police say Sandella Rashid was choked to death because she’d divorced the Pakistani man he’d arranged for her to marry. Said Detective Mike Christian, “he told us that he had killed his daughter that he didn’t not want the family dishonored by divorce”.
Closer to home, Caton says the closing of Abdallah’s death case is proof to him that Islamic law is affecting how Florida’s laws are enforced.
“Islamization of this country is the greatest threat to our way of life, our American way of life as we know it today,” he says.
Islamic activists insist religion is not to blame, says Maliq Saheed of the Pakistan American Society.
“This is personal, it’s sickness, it’s depression, or it’s family problems. His aggressiveness or anything he did he did to her personally, this is not related with the Muslims or not related to the Islam,” Saheed said.