Sara Ege used a stick to beat seven-year-old Yaseen “like a dog” if he couldn’t recite passages from the Islamic text.

Mother murdered son for 'failing to learn the Koran'

A mother murdered her young son and set his body on fire when he struggled to learn the Koran off by heart, a court has heard. 

Sara Ege used a stick to beat seven-year-old Yaseen “like a dog” if he couldn’t recite passages from the Islamic text.

The beatings were so brutal that the boy died from his injuries, and his mother tried to burn the body to destroy the evidence, Cardiff Crown Court was told.

Yaseen was originally thought to have died in the house fire. But a post-mortem examination showed Mrs Ege had been beating and abusing her little boy in the months leading up to his murder.

In a video recording of her interview with police, Mrs Ege told them: “I was trying to teach him the Koran.

“I was getting more and more frustrated. If he didn’t read it properly I would be very angry — I would hit him.

“We had a high target. I wanted him to learn 35 pages in three months.

“I promised him a new bike if he could do it. But Yaseen wasn’t very good — after a year of practice he had only learnt a chapter.”

The court heard Mrs Ege, 32, a university graduate, and her husband, Yousuf, had enrolled Yaseen in advanced classes at their local mosque.

They wanted him to become a hafiz — an Islamic term for someone who memorises the Koran.
Yaseen was coming to the end of a three-month trial period at the mosque, and Ege was keen for him to impress his Imam.

Mrs Ege told officers: “I was getting all this bad stuff in my head, like I couldn’t concentrate, I was getting angry too much, I would shout at Yaseen all the time.”

She also hit him with a hammer, a rolling pin and a slipper, as well as repeatedly punching him, the court heard.

She would allegedly lock him in the shed, tie him to a door, and force him to do press-ups.
In the months after Yaseen’s death, Mrs Ege told a doctor she been told to kill him by Shaitan — an Islamic name for the devil, the court was told.

She said: “I have become so harsh, I even killed my own son.”

Her husband, 38, denies causing or allowing the death of a child by not stopping the beatings.
The trial continues.

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Saudis to build major Islamic centre in Afghanistan

Saudi Arabia will build a massive Islamic centre complete with a university and a mosque in Afghanistan, an Afghan minister said Monday, describing the project as "grand and unique".


Estimated to cost up to $100 million, the centre on a hilltop in central Kabul will house up to 5,000 students, Dayi-Ul Haq Abed, the acting Hajj and religious affairs minister told AFP.

It will be named after Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the minister added.

"The agreement was signed last week in Jeddah. The construction will start next year, in couple of months or so," Abed said.


The mosque, similar to the Faisal Mosque in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad that was also built by oil-rich Saudi Arabia in 1980s, will hold 15,000 worshippers at a time.

The minister said the centre will be run jointly by the Saudi and Afghan ministries of religious affairs. Other universities in Afghanistan are run by the higher education ministry.


Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries -- along with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates -- that recognised the hardline Islamist Taliban regime during its rule in Afghanistan from 1996-2001.

The Taliban were overthrown in a US-led invasion shortly after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington for harbouring Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but have waged an 11-year insurgency.

The US and NATO still have more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan supporting the government of President Hamid Karzai, but they are due to pull out all combat forces by the end of 2014.

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