Muslim Man Guilty of 'Honor Killing' in Daughter's Death

Feb. 22, 2011— -- An Iraqi immigrant was found guilty of second degree murder today for running over his daughter, a crime motivated, prosecutors said, by the Arizona Muslim man's belief that the 20-year-old woman had become "too Westernized."

Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, was also convicted of aggravated assault, because the mother of his daughter's boyfriend was also injured when he ran down the two women with his Jeep Cherokee in a suburban Phoenix parking lot in the October 2009 incident.

Almaleki, who fled immediately after the incident, driving to Nogales, Mexico, was also convicted of two counts of leaving the scene of an accident.

The Iraqi man's lawyer had argued that he never intended to hit his daughter, Noor Almaleki, or 43-year-old Amal Khalef, with whose family the young woman was living at the time because of her disagreements with her father.

"I'm not trying to kill my daughter," Faleh Hassan Almaleki told investigators, according to tapes that were played during the trial. "If anything happened, accident."

Almaleki insisted to police that he loved his daughter, but he lost control of the vehicle and it was an accident.

"I run away because I've been waiting for my daughter, because if something happen to her, I kill myself," Almaleki said in the tape played at the trial.

"My daughter, she passed away, I kill myself," the man said. "That's what I've been waiting for."

But while he maintained that he didn't mean to kill her, he did tell the officers questioning him that he wanted to scare his daughter and maybe even hurt her when he drove the Cherokee at her.

According to prosecutors, Almaleki and his daughter fought over her adoption of Western ways, including her decision to attend college, her rejection of an arranged marriage and her chosing a boyfriend her parents did not approve of.