Story by REUBEN KYAMA and AGENCIES
Publication Date: 12/17/2006
Thirty-eight-year-old Farah Swaleh Noor left Kenya in the early 1990s and settled in Ireland in 1996 after siring a child with an Irish woman.
Sometime in 2003, Noor got involved with 51-year-old Kathleen Mulhall, a married woman. She left her husband, a bricklayer with a company in Dublin and her four children, all in their late teens or early adulthood. On March 20 last year, Noor, Kathleen and her two daughters, 24-year-old Charlotte, and Linda, 31, spent the day drinking in different bars in Dublin's city centre. The women were also popping ecstasy pills, popularly used in clubs and parties to keep one dancing without getting tired. They make people to see or hear things that do not exist.
Noor and the three women returned to Kathleen's house where they continued drinking. At some point as they were drinking, Kathleen reportedly crushed one of the ecstasy tablets and added it into Noor's drink without his knowledge.
She and Noor had an argument. Noor began fondling Linda and whispered something dirty in her ear. He was also threatening her mother.
Charlotte, who had been telling Noor to get his hands off her sister, picked up a box-cutter and cut his throat. As he staggered through a bedroom door, hitting his head on a bunk, she then hit him repeatedly on the head with a hammer while Linda stabbed him.
22 stab wounds
Noor received 22 stab wounds and had injuries to his internal organs, including the heart, liver, stomach and bladder. When he was dead, it took the sisters five hours to chop off his head, arms, legs and penis in the bathroom. Linda took the top half of the body into the shower and ran the water while she sawed the head, hacking away until it separated from the torso. Less than two feet away, Charlotte used a hammer and knives to cut Noor's legs.
The sisters put most of the body parts – seven in all – into bags which were later dumped in a river canal during several trips. Linda told the police that she put Noor's head in her son's schoolbag and, after kissing the satchel and saying a prayer, left it in a field in a south west Dublin suburb where the sisters lived.
It is unclear from the evidence heard in the murder trial where Kathleen Mulhall was or what she was doing all those hours while her firstborn child, Linda, was in the shower chipping away at the dead man's body with a hammer and her second-youngest child, Charlotte, sitting on the toilet seat, was using a kitchen knife to saw off Noor's legs.
The killing came to police notice only after Noor's leg, with a sock on the end, was seen floating in Dublin's Royal Canal 10 days after the attack at Kathleen Mulhall's flat. Police divers retrieved most of the rest of his body in seven parts. Noor's head and penis were never recovered.
When Noor's dismembered body was found last year, it took a number of months before he was initially identified through DNA testing with a son. Despite extensive searches by the police over the last 12 months, Noor's head has not been found.
In August last year, Kathleen and the husband she had left for Noor, John Mulhall, were arrested by police in relation to the killing. They were both released without charge. However, their two daughters were held and charged with Noor's murder. They were arrested after Linda contacted investigating officers admitting her involvement in Noor's death.
John Mulhall, unable to bear what had happened to his family, hanged himself from a tree in a public park. The two sisters who the Irish media had christened the Scissor Sisters after an American pop group denied murder charges.
Cutting his throat Initially, Charlotte told the police that she and Linda had been drinking "all over town" from 10pm until five or six o'clock in the morning and came home to find their mother covered in blood. Charlotte said that, at first, she thought her mother had been assaulted by Noor but that her mother had said she killed him with a hammer and by cutting his throat before chopping up his body.
Subsequently, at various times during the trial, the sisters insisted their mother was not involved in the killing but they also told officers that their mother kept urging them on. Charlotte told officers: Ma kept saying to me and Linda, 'Please just kill him for me.' "Then she got the hammer and the knife and she gave them to me and Linda but he wouldn't let Linda go so I cut him on the neck."
In March this year, Noor was buried at a Dublin cemetery following a service attended by about 40 of his friends. Last week, while sentencing the women, Mr Justice Paul Carney said the case was the "most grotesque killings" that had occurred within his professional lifetime.
Linda was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment while Charlotte will spend the rest of her life in prison for the murder of Noor. Linda's four children have been taken into foster care while a child born to Charlotte while she was on bail awaiting trial for murder is expected to be allowed to live with her mother in the women's prison until the child reaches the age of 18 months. The child is now eight months old.
Noor's mother, Samoea Swaleh Noor, reportedly welcomed the news of the Mulhall sisters' convictions. Mrs Noor, who could not afford to travel to Ireland to hear the details of her 38-year-old son's killing, said that she can finally find some peace.
Kathleen Mulhall who is described as "a very malign influence" on her family, never appeared at her daughters' murder trial. She is now being sought by Interpol after she fled Ireland and is suspected to have fled to Britain.
Source: http://www.nationmedia.com
Umayyad Mosque
