Death sentence for Uber driver who killed UK embassy worker
AN UBER driver was sentenced to death yesterday for the rape and murder of a British diplomat in Beirut.
Tarek Houshieh attacked Rebecca Dykes, 30, when she got into his taxi after enjoying a night out with friends in December 2017.
He strangled her with a rope before dumping her body by a motorway several miles from the nightspot where she was last seen.
Miss Dykes, who had been helping Lebanon to cope with the influx of refugees from the war in neighbouring Syria, was due to fly back to Britain to celebrate Christmas with her family the following day.
Houshieh confessed to the rape and murder days later. Yesterday, Judge Hanna Braidi sentenced him to death for carrying out the ‘premeditated and deliberate act’.
Lebanese judges routinely call for death sentences in murder cases, but no executions have been carried out since 2004 due to an unofficial moratorium.
There are at least 80 prisoners on death row in the Middle Eastern country.
The British Embassy said it hoped the court’s decision would ‘provide a degree of closure’ for those close to Miss Dykes, but said the UK Government remained ‘opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances’.
Miss Dykes, who worked for the Department for International Development, was described as extremely security conscious and ‘highly trained’ in anti-kidnap measures. She had been celebrating at a leaving do in a bar popular with expats in the trendy Gemmayzeh district of the city with five other women that night.
The diplomat ordered an Uber taxi through her mobile phone about midnight and her request was accepted by Houshieh.
She was found hours later with a rope tied around her throat, and her clothing ripped. Houshieh was arrested two days later after being tracked down on security camera footage.
It emerged that he had previously been arrested twice for alleged harassment and theft and had served prison sentences for other offences.
The revelation left Uber bosses red-faced because they insisted at the time that the driver had passed screening processes and checks did not uncover his criminal record.
It has since emerged that he might have faked his documents to get the job.
Miss Dykes’s father Philip is an Oxford-educated barrister who is the former Assistant Solicitor General in Hong Kong and chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Council. Her mother Jane Houng is a Cambridgeeducated children’s author who
‘A degree of closure’
lives in China where she has remarried after a divorce some years ago.
The family said at the time that they would ‘never fully recover’ from their loss, and that Miss Dykes had ‘improved the lives of countless refugees and vulnerable communities’ during her time in Lebanon.
‘She always wanted to make the world a better place – her humanitarian work in Beirut was testament to that,’ they said.
Born in Hong Kong, Miss Dykes went to Malvern Girls’ College in the UK and Rugby School. She studied anthropology at the University of Manchester, and had a Master’s from Birkbeck, University of London.
The Foreign Office advises against travelling to parts of Lebanon, including some areas of Beirut.