Cocaine kills: El-Ismailia Criminal Court has sentenced a farmer from an Arab country to death, having found him guilty of trying to smuggle 25kg of cocaine worth LE30 million into the country, via Port Nuweiba. It was last December that security authorities in South Sinai caught 40- year-old Lafi Manthar Farahan el-Shamri with the drugs in his Jeep. Lafi admitted that he'd intended to sell the drugs to the big dealers in Egypt. The arrest came when Egyptian authorities were tipped off about the condemned's activities. The cocaine had been cleverly concealed in the vehicle. Strangled at birth: Ayoung woman gave birth to a little boy in a hospital in Dessouq, Kafr el-Sheikh Governorate and promptly strangled him. She told police that she'd married a young man the orfi (unregistered) way and, when she got pregnant, he ran away, disowning his wife and their unborn child. After killing the tiny lad in Dessouq General Hospital, Fayza, 28, wept hysterically. She told detectives that she first met Mohamed, 30, when she was working in the Manshia district of Alexandria. When Mohamed abandoned her, taking the orfi certificate with him, Fayza went home to her family in the village of Mahalla Diai, near Dessouq. She still hoped that her husband would register the boy in his name, but it never happened. The nightmares continue: Meanwhile, a crime that happened in el Nahda district of Medinat el-Salem has received a lot of publicity. It involves a housewife who killed her son and said it was due to poverty. She also said that she kept dreaming of pimps advising her to beat poverty by selling her body, adding that the only way she could control these nightmares was by murdering her boy. Before killing the boy, she thought of killing herself, but then started wondering what her nine-year-old son would have to suffer if he were left alone in this world. So, she used a wet towel to suffocate him. Once he was dead, she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison and lying down next to him on the bed to die. All the poison succeeded in doing was giving her a nasty bout of diarrhoea. Next, she slashed her left wrist. It bled for six hours then stopped. By now, the body of little Ahmed Essam had started to smell, so his mother went to the police station and confessed. Detectives discovered that the killer was suffering from psychological problems, caused by a lack of money, which had forced her to remove her son from school. The problems for Siham, suspected of premeditated murder, really started ten years ago, when she married a lawyer; three months later, when she was already pregnant, he divorced her. When their son was born, she went to live in el-Sharqia Governorate for a while, before moving back to Cairo, settling in Medinat el Salem. Although she had passed the Thanawia Amma (General Secondary School Certificate), she couldn't find a job, while her brothers and sisters refused to help her and little Ahmed. “If only I could have afforded to keep my son at school. Then he might have had a dazzling future like my maternal uncle, who's done very well for himself working in a governmental ministry,” said Siham, whose nightmares are far from over.
