  |
KUWAIT CITY (AFP)
A Kuwait court on Sunday handed down a fourth death sentence on a 27-year-old Egyptian man accused of abducting and raping 17 children, a legal source said.
Jihad al-Saadi was arrested in July as he prepared to board a flight to Luxor in Egypt. Authorities said he confessed to raping 17 children in Hawalli, a residential district 12 kilometers (seven miles) south of Kuwait City.
The court, which has been trying the man on a case-by-case basis, had already issued three death sentences and a life term on Saadi.
In September, he told the court his confession had been obtained under torture and denied all the charges against him.
Saadi had earned the nickname “the Hawalli monster” after a spate of rapes of boys and girls aged 10 years and younger, whom he lured onto rooftops in the residential district, mostly inhabited by foreign workers.
