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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Sharia Judge Hears Dispute About Moslem Embezzler Guaridan of Christian Children |
| 2004-10-25 |
| From Compass Direct A Jordanian judge heard opposing testimony from Christian widow Siham Qandah last week, calling her to the witness stand on October 21 over the disputed use of her children's trust funds by their Muslim guardian. Qandah's statements before Judge Mahmud Zghul of the Al-Abdali Sharia Court in Amman flatly contradicted court testimony given 10 days earlier by guardian Abdullah al-Muhtadi. As Qandah's estranged brother who converted to Islam as a teenager, al-Muhtadi has been trying to gain custody of her two minor children through Jordan's Islamic court system. Al-Muhtadi had testified in court to Judge Zghul on October 10 that his massive withdrawals of more than $17,000 from the children's orphan trust funds had all been spent "legitimately." Most of the money was used for paying his lawyers' fees in the long-fought custody case, he declared. He also claimed to have given Qandah 750 Jordanian dinars ($1,100) in cash to buy a refrigerator for her daughter Rawan, now 16, and son Fadi, who turns 15 next week. "I told the judge that I had never received any money from the guardian for a refrigerator," Siham told Compass yesterday. "And he has not been giving me the children's monthly benefits, either. In fact, he has never even visited our family for the past 10 years, to see if we needed anything. My son Fadi is almost 15, and he was only five years old the last time he saw his guardian." After repeatedly failing to appear in court, al-Muhtadi answered an official court subpoena to testify before Judge Zghul on October 10. When he was again summoned for the October 21 hearing, the court waited until 1:30 that afternoon for him to appear. When the guardian failed to come, Judge Zghul heard Qandah's testimony and then set November 9 for a final hearing on the case. Qandah said the judge spoke with her privately after last week's hearing. The judge reportedly told her that the children's guardian should understand that he was "accountable to Allah," if he was not telling the truth to the court. "I told the judge that I don't care about the trust fund," Qandah said. "The guardian can take all that money. I don't want it or anything else, just my children." Qandah said that her daughter Rawan, who is the official plaintiff in the pending case to cancel al-Muhtadi's guardianship, will be required to attend the November 9 hearing, when final arguments and testimony on the case will be heard. In August, Jordan's Supreme Islamic Court upheld an appeal filed by Qandah's lawyer, protesting against the lower court's refusal to disqualify al-Muhtadi as a fit guardian for the children for alleged mishandling of their trust funds. Judge Zghul was instructed by the supreme court to investigate the guardian's actual use of these large sums of money, which he had withdrawn after obtaining written authorization from various Islamic court judges, including the chief justice. Qandah and al-Muhtadi have been embroiled in a judicial wrangle since 1998, when he filed suit to take custody of the children away from his Christian sister and raise them as Muslims. After Qandah's Christian husband died 10 years ago while serving as a soldier in the U.N. Peacekeeping Forces in Kosovo, an Islamic court produced a "conversion" certificate claiming he had secretly converted to Islam three years earlier. So even though the children were baptized Christians, Islamic law automatically made them Muslims, and their financial affairs could no longer be handled by their Christian mother. Qandah asked her Muslim brother to become their legal guardian, but to her dismay, he soon began to appropriate the children's monthly orphans' benefits. Later he dipped into their trust funds allocated by the United Nations for them to inherit at age 18, through the Widows and Orphans Fund of the Jordanian army. [Kofi Annan is surely to blame for this!] After Qandah's brother learned that she had enrolled both children in a Christian school and was taking them to church regularly in Husn, their hometown in northern Jordan, al-Muhtadi opened a case in the Islamic courts to take them into his home to raise as Muslims. The Supreme Islamic Court ruled in his favor in February 2002. Despite court orders to hand over her children or face prison, Qandah has gone into hiding with her children several times over the past 30 months, while appealing for legal or diplomatic intervention to reverse the decision. Her children are blacklisted by court order from leaving the country. Jordan's royal family, including King Abdullah II and Queen Rania, have actively monitored the case, pledging that Qandah will neither go to jail nor lose her children. But they have stopped short of direct interference in the judicial process. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |