CAIRO: Today the South Giza court will hear the verdict of the Suzanne Tamim murder trial for which construction mogul Hisham Talaat Moustafa and former police officer Mohsen Al-Sukkari are standing trial. Al-Sukkari is accused of carrying out the murder - a brutal killing in which Tamim was stabbed several times and had her throat slit - at the behest of Moustafa, who was romantically linked with the singer in the past, according to his lawyer. It was police authorities in Dubai who identified Al-Sukkari and he was arrested an hour and a half after landing in Cairo on the same day of the murder. They identified him using footage from the building's security cameras and found a change of clothes caked with blood outside the building. Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim was murdered in Dubai July 28. Al-Sukkari was arrested immediately and Moustafa was taken into custody in September. The trial began in mid-October. Moustafa, the billionaire former chairman of the development behemoth Talaat Moustafa Group was arrested Sept. 2 after parliamentary immunity was lifted from him. He is also a member of the policies secretariat of the National Democratic Party. His lawyer Fareed El-Dib could not be reached for comment. A press ban on the case instituted by the presiding judge Al-Mohammedi Qunsua shortly after the trial began meant details of events inside the courtroom could not be reported. Five journalists from Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al-Wafd were fined LE 10,000 each in February for violating the press ban in place over the Tamim murder trial. The fines were imposed on Al-Masry Al-Youm editor Magdy El-Gallad along with reporters Yousri El-Badri and Farouk El-Dessouki as well as Al-Wafd editor Abbas El-Tarabili and journalist Ibrahim Qaraa. Lawyer and member of Al-Wasat party Essam Sultan, who represented El-Gallad in the journalists trial, told Daily News Egypt Today s verdict is impossible to predict for an outsider because no one was privy to the testimonies of the witnesses or the forensic reports. Almost from the beginning there was a ban on the details of the case so no one knows how it has developed except for the people inside the courtroom, he added.
