The victims were stabbed, strangled and burned, according to the documents. The Dhanaks' Anaheim Hills home was set on fire.
Iftekhar Murtaza was identified by a "victim," according to police documents presented to the Superior Court.
The motive for the crime appears to be a dispute over religion.
"Information developed revealed the suspect was upset with Shayona's parents and sister for discontinuing the relationship due to different religious backgrounds, Hindu and Muslim," the papers said.
The Dhanaks were reported by friends and neighbors to be devout members of the strict Swaminarayan branch of Hinduism. Murtaza is Muslim.
Read the entire article.
This blogger has posted about the above story, here and here. From the second of those postings:
second recent hate crime in america by the beloved 'south asian' brothers. first one last week was when a sikh boy had his hair chopped off forcibly in new york. second is this.MSNBC has published this story on the web. In spite of the family's financial and legal difficulties,
it is clearly a religious hate crime.
[...]
this is a premedidated and absolutely brutal act of jihad by more than one mohammedan.
Anaheim police spokesman Sgt. Rick Martinez said police did not believe the crime to be a murder-suicide.
"We're treating this as a double homicide," Martinez said.
Not as a hate crime, as was the bacon on the Koran?
According to this source:
...Van Nuys resident Iftekhar Murtaza was arrested by U.S. Marshals at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Arizona, as he was attempting to leave the country.
Murtaza is being called a person of interest in the May 21, 2007, Anaheim murders of 56-year-old Jayprakash Dhanak and 20-year-old Karishima Dhanak, and the assault on 53-year-old Leela Dhanak. Karishima Dhanak was the daughter of Jayprakash and Leela.
Leela Dhanak was beaten with a blunt instrument and taken to the hospital. The burned bodies of Jayprakash and Karishima were found later on May 22 on a remote bike path in Irvine.
According to court documents acquired by the Orange County Register, Murtaza was arrested at a Phoenix airport with a one way ticket to Bangladesh.
The court documents detail for the first time a motive for the brutal crimes. Murtaza is Muslim. His girlfriend, 18-year-old Shayona Dhanak, younger sister of Karishma and daughter of Jayprakash who were killed are Hindu, according to the OC Register.
Court documents say that the parents and sister pushed Shayona to discontinue her relationship with Murtaza, according to the OC Register.
Witnesses told detectives they saw two people attacking Leela on the front lawn on May 21, and the Dhanak's Anaheim house was set on fire; the cars in front of the house were also burned.
Details are still developing. Let's see how much coverage the mainstream media will give the above story, particularly if the crime turns out to have been motivated by the kill-the-infidel ideology of Islam.
From the mug shot, the suspect has a really sinister look about him. The girl's parents were right. Regardless of the religious aspect, I would not want my daughter to date such a shady character.
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