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A Texas man found was found guilty on Friday of murdering his wife who had asked for a divorce the day after their marriage, officials said.
Tareq Alkayyali, 39, of Arlington, was found guilty of strangling to death his 23-year-old wife Wasam Moussa in May 2019 — just days after she arrived in Texas to visit her husband from her home country of Jordan, the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office said in a release.
Hours after the verdict, a jury sentenced Alkayyali to 23 years in prison.
Assistant Tarrant County Criminal District Attorneys Allenna Bangs and Madeline Jones told the jury how Moussa was hesitant to marry Alkayyali in Jordan back in 2018, and had told her husband that she wanted a divorce the very next day.
Prosecutors said that the two never honeymooned, and Wasam returned to her family’s home with her belongings the day after the wedding. Alkayyali returned to his home and job in Arlington. During their months apart, he had an affair with one of his coworkers, officials said.
Wasam traveled to Texas to visit her husband on May 25, 2019 for a short visit during which the two argued and talked about divorce. After one of their fights, Wasam told her brother that Alkayyali covered her mouth with his hand.
“She went to the United States to try to give her husband a chance to make a life for her family,” said Moussa’s brother, Ahmad Ali, in a 2019 email to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
“She went there knowing that she had a lot of problems with him,” Ali wrote, adding that she was scared of him.
Alkayyali killed his wife on May 28, 2019, strangling her during another argument, prosecutors said. The night before she died, Alkayyali had googled how to have his wife deported, prosecutors said.
Afterward, he allegedly left her on the bed and said she had fainted. An autopsy determined she was killed by asphyxiation.
“He put his hand over her face, a person that he loved, and he watched as the light went out of her eyes,” Allenna Bangs told the jury. “What is a life worth?”
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