LOS ANGELES — A Southern California man was sentenced on Friday to life in prison for fatally stabbing an engineering student from Saudi Arabia who the killer met after the victim posted an online ad to sell his car two years ago, prosecutors said.
The remains of the victim, Abdullah Abdullatif Alkadi, 23, were found alongside a freeway in the desert town of Indio, about 125 miles (200 km) east of Los Angeles, in October 2014, about a month after he went missing.
Alkadi, an international student at California State University, Northridge, had been last seen at his residence in the Los Angeles suburb of Reseda on Sept. 17.
Authorities said the killer, Agustin Rosendo Fernandez, 30, stabbed Alkadi to death that day, when he showed up at the victim's home to pick up an Audi A5 convertible that Alkadi had agreed to sell him for $35,000 in an earlier meeting between the two men.
Fernandez, who had found Alkadi's car-for-sale ad on Craigslist, kept the cash and then made off with the vehicle, disposing of Alkadi's body along the way. Prosecutors said the stolen car was later found parked at the killer's apartment in Long Beach.
Fernandez in June was tried and found guilty of first-degree murder in Alkadi's death. The jury also found in favor of special circumstances of murdering during a robbery and murder during a carjacking, as well as personal use of a deadly weapon.
Under the sentence handed down on Friday, Fernandez will serve a life term in state prison without the possibility of parole, according to a statement issued by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.
Muslim woman sues Chicago officers
Meanwhile, a young Muslim woman sued Chicago police who mistakenly identified her briefly as a potential "lone wolf" terrorist as she was leaving a city subway station last year on the Fourth of July wearing a headscarf, face veil and carrying a backpack.
Itemid Al-Matar says officers violated her civil rights by pulling off her religious garb as they arrested her on subway station stairs, then strip-searched her later at a police station, according to the federal lawsuit filed in Chicago on her behalf.
"Several (officers) ran up the stairs and grabbed the Plaintiff and threw her down upon the stair landing, then pulling at her and ripping off her hijab," it says.
Security-camera video made public shows several minutes of the arrest in the subway. Several officers can be seen pushing through a crowd on a stairway to reach Al-Matar, but soon move out of view of the camera. The fact that Al-Matar was wearing a headscarf, known as a hijab, and the face veil, called a niqab, "was the impetus behind the actions" of the officers, the court filing alleges.
In a statement Thursday, Phil Robertson, a lawyer for the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, and a co-counsel in the civil case, argued that "blatant xenophobia, Islamophobia, and racial profiling" underpinned the officers' actions.
A police report filed the night of the incident says officers had been "on high alert of terrorist activity" on the Fourth of July holiday when they spotted Al-Matar exhibiting what they believed was "suspicious behavior," including walking at "a brisk pace, in a determined manner." It also says officers saw what they thought could be "incendiary devices" around her ankles and were also suspicious of her backpack, which was clutched to her chest.
"(Officers) believed that subject might be a lone wolf suicide bomber and decided to attempt to take subject into custody," it says.
A K-9 unit searched for explosive materials, the report says, "with negative results," while "the objects strapped around arrestee's ankles" turned out to be "ankle weights."
But Al-Matar was still charged, including with obstructing justice after police accused her of resisting and refusing to comply with orders. She was acquitted on all charges at a state trial earlier this year.
