U.S. charges son in Navy worker’s death

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — U.S. prosecutors have charged the son of a civilian Navy staff member in Bahrain over her stabbing death in the Mideast island kingdom.

Federal court documents accuse Giovonni Pope, 27, in the stabbing death of his mother at her off-base apartment on Jan. 31. Contact details for Pope could not be immediately found and his listed public defender declined to comment Saturday.

Court documents identify his mother only by the initials E.A., describing her as a civilian Defense Department employee at Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the home of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. She had worked there since September 2017.

An affidavit by a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service says the woman’s co-workers became worried when she didn’t arrive at work Feb. 1. Investigators discovered her body under a blanket in her apartment, repeatedly stabbed.

Bahraini police later arrested Pope. He told Bahraini investigators at one point that he killed his mother as she “was blocking him from achieving his goals by not letting him return to the United States to work on his clothing business,” the agent’s affidavit claims.

Bahrain had declined to prosecute Pope if the U.S. tried him, the agent said. U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas DiGirolamo of Maryland issued an order Thursday for him to be returned to America to face trial on a murder charge.

The U.S. Embassy in Bahrain and the Navy’s investigators did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday, nor did Bahrain’s Interior Ministry.