Every third day, in our #EveryThreeDays campaign, I write about a woman killed by a man. Previously this month, we have remembered Rosemary Gill, Laura Davies, Lisa Anthony together with her daughter Ava, Carol Milne, Hollie Gazzard, Tracy Baker, Celine Dookhran and on the 22nd of July, Suzie Morl, a trans woman from Manchester.
Today we remember twenty-one-year-old Amal Abdi, who was four months pregnant at the time of her murder. Amal lived in a block of flats in Bristol with her husband Abdirashid Khadar, 22, together with their young daughter. They had married some years earlier in Ethiopia and initially kept up a long-distance relationship as Khadar could not get the proper travel documents to enter the UK.
Sadly, shortly after Abdirashid Khadar rejoined his wife, the relationship started to break down, and on the morning of Sunday, the 26th of July 2015, Amal told Khadar she no longer wanted to stay married to him, requesting a divorce.
That evening Khadar took his revenge, strangling Amal, stabbing her ten tens in her neck and body using three different knives. He then phoned the police telling the operator in a heavy accent, ‘I’m kill someone. I’m kill my wife.’
The emergency services arrived shortly afterwards but were unable to save Amal, and Khadar was charged with murder for which he pleaded not guilty. His case came to court one year later, but the jury took just two hours forty minutes to find him guilty, with the judge, Justice Neil Garnham QC saying this on sentencing him:
‘This was a brutal and unprovoked attack on a young woman in her own home. You stabbed her not once but ten times. It is plain you attacked her from behind, or you carried on stabbing her after she attempted to turn away or after she had fallen to the floor.
This was an appalling and cowardly attack on a defenceless woman. I have no doubt that you intended to kill her. You cut her down and left her dead on the floor of her own sitting room.’
Abdirashid Khadar was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of twenty years – that, however, does not help his young daughter nor bring back Amal or her unborn child.
Male violence against women and girls is prevalent both in the UK and across the globe – Amal was amongst 120 other women killed by a man in the UK in 2015, and since that time, violence against women has increased. In the UK nineteen out of every twenty women killed are murdered by a man she knows, often a partner or a former partner.
Amal Abdi.
#EveryThreeDays
Authored by Steph @PlaceSteph
