Refugee Wife of Iraqi Shiite Imam Murdered in California

Someone broke into the home of a Muslim mother and bludgeoned her to death with a tire iron. The attacker left a note calling her a terrorist and demanding she go back to her home country. Of course there is already an outcry of hate crimes, but a home invasion crime in an upscale neighborhood in broad daylight has aroused my suspicions. The investigation is still underway.

And from the WaPo here:

Shaima Alawadi, 32, was taken off life support on Saturday, three days after her 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious in the dining room of the family’s El Cajon home in suburban San Diego.

Investigators said they’re exploring all aspects of her slaying, including the possibility that the attack was a hate crime.

Alawadi’s father is Sayed Nabeel Alawadi, a Shiite cleric in Iraq, a Muslim leader in Michigan told the Detroit Free-Press on Sunday. “Everybody is outraged,” Imam Husham Al-Husainy of the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center in Dearborn said. “This is too evil, too criminal.”

Alawadi moved to the United States in 1993 with her family and was part of a wave of Shiite Muslim refugees who fled to Michigan after Saddam Hussein cracked down on an uprising in 1991.

After living in Dearborn for a few years, she moved to the San Diego area in 1996, graduated from high school and became a housewife raising five children.

Alawadi’s brothers worked for the U.S. Army, serving as cultural advisers to train soldiers who were going to be deployed to the Middle East. Another family friend told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Alawadi’s husband had a similar job.

It was a heinous crime and no one has been arrested. But the woman was a daughter of a political leader in Iraq, so I am also apt to think she may have been a target of political assassination, but details of the crime are still not fully known. But people just don’t break in and hate murder people in San Diego.