FBI agent provides ‘honor killing’ details
Defendant’s wife also expected to tesify against him
A Houston FBI agent testified Tuesday about the efforts a Jordanian patriarch went through to build a family in Montgomery County, including marrying two women, one of whom allegedly helped him commit two “honor killings.”
Shmou Ali Alrawabdeh, 40, is expected to testify this week against her husband, 60-year-old Ali Mahwood-Awad Irsan, a Jordanian-American on trial on capital murder charges. Alrawabdeh may be one of the last witnesses as prosecutors work to wrap up the unusual case in its fourth week of testimony.
Special prosecutors this week have called a half-dozen witnesses, including FBI agents and experts in DNA, fibers and ballistics to testify against the father of 12 who is accused of a pair of “honor killings” that shocked Houston in 2012.
FBI Special Agent Carlos Acosta testified Tuesday that he was part of a task force of federal, state and local law enforcement officers assigned to investigate the fatal shootings of Irsan’s sonin-law, Coty Beavers, 28, and his daughter’s best friend, Gelareh Bagherzadeh, an Iranian medical student and activist.
Acosta testified that he feared for the safety of Irsan’s daughter, Nesreen, because she appeared to be at the center of the case because she had run away from home, converted to Christianity and married Beavers, a Christian.
“She knew her husband had been murdered and didn’t want to be next,” Acosta told the jury. “She was very paranoid and feared for her safety.”
Tracing Irsan
In lengthy court testimony, Acosta and other officials traced Ali Irsan’s arrival to America from Jordan in 1979 on a student visa when he was 22.
A year later, Irsan married a woman from Iowa, and the couple had their first child in 1981. Over the following decade he and his first wife had four children, Irsan’s defense team has said. He then returned to Jordan, where he met and married a 15-year-old girl.
In 1994, he divorced his first wife and was able to bring his new wife to America a year later. She became a citizen in 2001 and is is expected to be one of the final and most significant witnesses in the case against Irsan. Together, Alrawabdeh and Irsan had eight children who lived together in a rural Montgomery County compound with the four children from his first marriage.
Special prosecutor Jon Stephenson said in opening statements that Irsan, a fervent Muslim, killed Beavers and Bagherzadeh so his daughter Nesreen would suffer.
“He wanted to kill her,” Stephenson said, referring to Irsan’s daughter. “But he wanted to kill all those she loved first, so that she would suffer that much more before she died.”
Irsan’s attorneys have said jurors would not be able to find beyond a reasonable doubt that the two slayings were connected or that Ali Irsan was involved with either.
Although investigators searched Irsan’s rural Montgomery County compound, very little direct evidence was found tying him to the pair of shootings.
Stephenson said that Alrawabdeh will testify against Irsan in exchange for a lighter prison sentence because she wants to be with her children again. She is charged with murder.
Crucial testimony
Specifically, she is expected to testify that she and Irsan, along with other members of the family, stalked Irsan’s adult daughter Nesreen because she ran away from the family compound, converted to Christianity and married Beavers. They also vandalized vehicles that belonged to the Beavers family, prosecutors said.
But more critically, Irsan’s second wife is expected to confirm earlier testimony from a relative that she was present during at least one of the honor killings.
Alrawabdeh is expected to testify that she was with Irsan and his oldest son, Nasim, as they drove to Bagherzadeh’s home in Houston the night of her death in January 2012. When the 30-yearold medical student arrived at the Galleria-area townhouse where she lived with her parents, she remained in her car talking on the phone.
Alrawabdeh is expected to testify that she watched Nasim get out and shoot Bagherzadeh in the head though the passenger side window of her car. Nasim Irsan, 24, remains in the Harris County jail without bail on a charge of capital murder.
Prosecutors have been tightlipped about whether Alrawabdeh was present 11 months later when Coty Beavers was gunned down in the northwest Harris County apartment he had leased with Nesreen.
However, they have argued that Irsan orchestrated the slaying.
Under Texas law, if prosecutors can prove both shootings were part of the same scheme, Irsan can be convicted of capital murder.
The trial, in state District Judge Jan Krocker’s court, is expected to last six to eight weeks.