Story By: James King, Sub-Editor: Marija Stojkoska, Agency: Newsflash
A Moroccan-born Italian man has been jailed for 30 years for murdering his wife, whose badly burned body was found in a car after she told him she wanted a divorce.
Khalil Laamane, 51, has been convicted of killing his wife Ghizlan El Hadraoui, 38, by the Supreme Court in Modena in Italy, which heard that a month before she died in February 2019, she had reported him for assaulting her after years of abuse.
The two were both originally from Morocco but had Italian passports. They also had two children together.
The mother of two died after she was stabbed four times in the back and then her body was set on fire, and her husband has now been convicted of murder and concealment of the corpse.
The court heard that he refused to accept that they were going to separate, and after stabbing her, had then put her body in his car and set it on fire in order to hide the fact that she had been killed.
The blaze was spotted, however, by a passing policeman, who extinguished it, and he was arrested. The fact that the fire had been extinguished quickly allowed police to realise immediately that it was a murder, and the husband was arrested.
Police found evidence of flammable liquid that had been spilled over the vehicle and quickly realised it was deliberate, and the body was identified.
Among the evidence was a keyring that had been found in a carwash used by the accused shortly after her killing. The keyring had belonged to his wife and it is believed he took the car to the wash to remove evidence before then burning the interior as well for good measure.
The court heard that he never admitted killing her, instead when being quizzed saying that he had become depressed and desolate after learning that she was leaving him. The divorce had not yet gone through when she was murdered, but she had reported him to police over the assault.
He had originally been jailed for 22 years, but his lawyer appealed, and he has now been given the bad news that instead of being cancelled, the sentence has been increased to 30 years.
