CAIRO, May 21 (RIA Novosti) - A Cairo court has sentenced one of Egypt's top real estate developers and a retired police officer to death for murdering a Lebanese pop star last year in Dubai, the Gulf News daily reported on Thursday.
Egyptian billionaire senator Hesham Talaat Mustafa, 50, and Mohseen Al Sukkari, 39, will be executed by hanging.
The two men were found guilty of the fatal stabbing of singer Suzanne Tamim in a luxury apartment in Dubai in July last year. She was 30 years old.
Al Sukkari claimed that Mustafa, who was allegedly having an affair with the singer, had hired him to kill Tamim for $2 million. Mustafa has denied the accusations.
Confirmation of the death penalty will be handed down on June 25 by a higher court.
Al Sukkari was to kill Tamim in London where she was residing, either by running her down with a car or throwing her over the balcony of a hotel. However, the singer suspected a murder plot, and surrounded herself with security guards.
The contract killer then followed the singer to Dubai. Video footage presented in court shows Al Sukkari entering and exiting the entrance of the building where Tamim was staying on the day of the murder.
According to investigators, the reason for the murder could have been extreme jealousy on the part of the businessman toward the singer.
Al Sukkari was arrested in Cairo after United Arab Emirates police issued a request. Mustafa was arrested only after Egypt's parliament speaker rescinded Mustafa's immunity from prosecution.
Although it was earlier reported that Tamim had been beheaded, the lawyer of her former husband revealed that her death certificate states that her throat was slit. At the time of her death, she had been married to Iraqi-born British kickboxing champion Riyadh Al-Azzawi for about 18 months.
Tamim won fame after appearing on a TV talent show in Lebanon in 1996, but her career was marred by stories of her troubled private life. Her divorce from her first husband, Ali Muzannar, flooded the Lebanese media.
Tamim later married Lebanese impresario and producer Adel Matouk, who became her manager. Once they divorced, Tamim fled from her home in Beirut to Egypt after Matouk filed a series of lawsuits against her, including embezzlement, fraud, slander and libel.
