I saw my husband shoot our 7-year-old girl dead
A MOTHER yesterday described her horror at seeing her estranged husband shoot their seven-yearold girl dead.
Yasser Alromisse, 46, fired twice into the back of daughter Mary’s head as she returned home from school.
He then turned the gun on himself on the back seat of the car he was hiding in.
The ambush took place outside the safe house Mary and her mother Lyndsey Shipstone had sought refuge in after years of abuse by Alromisse.
Giving evidence at the inquest into both deaths, Mrs Shipstone said she had been decorating her daughter’s bedroom that day. ‘I was putting my key in the door and I said to Mary “You’ll like what I’ve done to your room”,’ recalled the 43-year- old. ‘ That was the last thing I said to her.
‘Then there was a terrific sound behind me like somebody had burst a balloon. The first thing I saw was Mary on the ground like her legs had crumpled under her.
‘I saw my husband’s face in the back seat and he was holding a black gun. I realised right away what had happened because he went on to shoot her again.
‘He didn’t show any emotion. I just started screaming that she had been shot.’
Alromisse, who was born in Egypt, killed himself with a single shot to the temple.
The inquest heard he had used rented cars to covertly track down his wife after the private investigator he hired had failed to find her. Mary had just completed her first violin lesson and one of the bullets that killed her passed through her new instrument case.
She was only a few days short of her eighth birthday.
Mrs Shipstone told the inquest in Hastings, East Sussex, that she had had a turbulent relationship with Alromisse.
She was experimenting with Islam when she met him in October 2005 through a website for Muslims seeking marriage.
They married within a month and Mrs Shipstone was pregnant with Mary by December. The couple moved to Brighton in June 2006 but by then were unhappy together, with Alromisse saying he did not want a child.
Miss Shipstone said: ‘We were very isolated. I lost contact with my family – at his insistence.
‘He was very controlling. It was more psychological abuse than physical. He would need to give me permission to leave the house and he would throw things.
‘He burnt my arm to try to make me terminate the pregnancy.’
Alromisse walked out on his family three weeks after Mary was born and he moved to Wigan. He used the courts to secure access to the girl while continuing his abuse of her mother.
He managed to get the pair to go to Egypt in 2011 where they were apparently kept in virtual captivity and denied their passports. Mrs Shipstone plotted a successful escape with their help of her mother.
When he shot their daughter in Rye, East Sussex, in September last year, Mrs Shipstone was pregnant by her fiancé Jason Deane.
East Sussex Coroner Alan Craze recorded Mary’s death as unlawful killing and her father’s as suicide.
He said: ‘I would normally say he committed suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. I do not consider it to be appropriate in this case.’
A previous partner of Alromisse, who had a masters degree in criminology, said he claimed to have been injured in the head and chest while fighting as a jihadi.
‘He didn’t show any emotion’