Zakaria Oweiss, the suburban Washington gynecologist charged with murdering his wife a week ago, is due to appear in a US court on September 14, court sources told AFP Wednesday.
A request from his lawyer to have him released on bond pending the hearing was refused on the grounds that he might flee, officials said.
Oweiss, 57, was until last week a respected member of the community in the posh Maryland suburb of Potomac, close to the US capital, where he had lived for ten years after emigrating from Egypt in 1977.
He is charged with having on August 15 murdered his wife, German-born Marianne Oweiss, 49, who in addition to being the mother of their two sons, Omar, 20, and Amin, 18, was a real estate agent.
Oweiss told police after his arrest that his wife had been involved in an extramarital affair and planned to leave him.
"Oweiss claimed that the marriage showed signs of improvement," a police report said. But "interviews with family members contradicted that statement, and suggested that the marriage had all but ended."
Local emergency services responding to a call from the family home found Marianne Oweiss dead at the bottom of a staircase. A violent struggle had taken place, and she had severe head wounds, the police said.
According to the Washington Post’s story on the incident on August 17, Omar Oweiss awoke Wednesday morning to his mother's screams. He found her lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs leading to his father's basement gynecology office.
He found his father outside, pacing in the driveway in front of the perfectly trimmed lawn of the family's two-story Potomac house. He had a gash across his chest, and blood was splattered on his glasses.
Marianne Oweiss was already dead of "severe wounds to her head" when paramedics arrived, police said later.
Just a day earlier, she had returned from overseas, police said. Colleagues said she had told them she was going to her native Germany.
Her husband told police she had been to his home town in Egypt and there had dishonored the family by having an extramarital affair, according to prosecutors.
Oweiss was charged with first-degree murder in the death of his wife. Montgomery State's Attorney Douglas F. Gansler said after the hearing that Oweiss returned the previous Friday from Egypt, where he had gone to investigate allegations of an affair.
"The motive here was a cultural one," Gansler said. "That his wife, in his words, disgraced the family."
He said Oweiss gave investigators "many inconsistent statements," in particular about the slash on his chest. According to court documents, Oweiss originally told investigators that he didn't have the wound before Wednesday morning and didn't know how he had gotten it. He later said he had gotten it from a tree branch several days earlier, the documents show – Albawaba.com
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