Fourteen-year-old Asya Ahmad Muhammed stabbed and killed her uncle while he was beating her.  She has been found guilty of murder and ordered to serve five years in a juvenile detention facility.  Her lawyer has launched an appeal.

Judge Satar Sofe convicted 14-year-old Asya Ahmad Muhammad of murder at the trial’s first hearing on February 7 in Dohuk’s juvenile court. Muhammad’s defense lawyer appealed the ruling on February 17, questioning Sofe’s conclusion that the killing had been intentional.

“The court should consider Maria’s [Muhammad’s Christian name] case unintentional killing because she didn’t intend to kill her uncle,” Akram Mikhael Al-Najar told Compass.
. . .
Muhammad stabbed her paternal uncle with a kitchen knife last July when he came to her family’s kitchen utensil store on the outskirts of Dohuk and began beating her, her mother and younger brother.

Her uncle Sayeed Muhammed was Muslim, while her father Ahamd Muhammed had converted to Christianity in 1998.  Asya, her mother, and a brother were baptised in 2003.  The conversion has been a source of frequent anger and violence.

Asya Muhammad’s father, Ahmad, told Compass that his brother had previously tried to murder him five times, angered by his conversion to Christianity.

In the wake of Sayeed Muhammad’s death, Asya Muhammad’s grandparents called for her father to be killed. External mediators later convinced the grandparents that Asya Muhammad’s father had nothing to do with his brother’s death, leading the elderly couple to demand their granddaughter’s death and a large sum instead.

If her sentence is upheld, she will be the only female minor in the prison.

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