A father accused of trying to strangle his teenage daughter in a Muslim ‘honor killing’ has been jailed for almost three years.
Ihsan Ali, 44, stood trial for second-degree attempted murder alongside his wife Zahraa Subhi Mohsin Ali, 40, over the October 18, 2024, attack.
A Thurston County Superior Court jury found them not guilty on July 31, but convicted Ihsan of lesser charges against his daughter Fatima Ali.
Ihsan was jailed for 14 months for second-degree assault, 12 months for unlawful imprisonment, and 182 days for fourth-degree assault.
He was also ordered to complete a parenting class, do 18 months of community service, and have no contact with his daughter for 10 years.
Judge Christine Schaller blasted Ihsan for his ‘horrific actions’ including his ‘vicious assault on Fatima’ outside Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington.
The judge said she gave him maximum sentences because of the brutality of the crime and that Fatima was under Ihsan’s care as his daughter.
She said of his assault on Fatima’s boyfriend: ‘He victimized a defenseless young man for no reason and it is Isiah’s good fortune that he was not more badly injured.’
Ihsan Ali, 44, listens as his daughter Fatima Ali tells the court at his attempted murder trial how he tried to choke the life out of her in an alleged ‘honor killing’
Fatima’s mother Zahraa Subhi Mohsin Ali, 40, was accused of trying to finished the job after Ihsan was detained. She is pictured in court
Judge Schaller also sentenced Zahraa for breaching a restraining order, which she already served in pretrial detention.
Ihsan spent the past almost 10 months behind bars since his arrest days after the attack and will be credited with time served. Zahraa was released on July 31.
Zahraa cried as Fatima, now 18, read an emotional victim impact statement to the court before the sentencing, calling Ihsan a ‘monster’ who tried to kill her with his own hands.
Fatima told police she ran away from home to after her parents tried to put her on a plane to Iraq.
‘Her father had recently been threatening her with honor killing for refusing an arranged marriage with an older man in another county,’ the initial police press release alleged.
But this claim, central to the prosecution’s original case last year, was completely absent from the three-week trial last month, by court order.
Jurors were shown horrifying video of Ihsan grabbing Fatima by the throat before putting her in a chokehold on the ground outside the school.
Fatima Ali, now 18, (pictured outside court during trial) told police she ran away from home to Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington, after her parents tried to put her on a plane to Iraq
In the most gut-wrenching moment of the trial, Fatima took to the stand to testify against her own parents
The footage is shocking, as were numerous witness accounts from traumatized teens, her boyfriend Isiah, and two men who stopped to help.
‘Her face was looking pale and her eyes were starting to roll back,’ Isiah, who was just 16 at the time, told the court through tears as he gave evidence.
Other students described how Fatima ‘couldn’t breathe’ her ‘lips were turning purple’ and she grabbed at her father’s arm in ‘obvious distress’.
Josh Wagner, a motorist who stopped his car in the middle of the road and ran to help, said her face was ‘changing color… she was gonna lose consciousness if it continued’.
Fatima herself took the witness stand and testified that she lost consciousness four times and was terrified that she was going to die.
The jury also heard that after Isiah, her classmates, and Wagner freed her by punching and kicking Ihsan dozens of times, Zahraa tried to finish the job.
‘When she (Fatima) got away from her father, she tried to run, and her mom had grabbed her and she was grabbing her by the throat,’ one classmate testified, as did other witnesses.
Video showed Ihsan on the ground outside his daughter’s school, Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington, with her in a chokehold while her boyfriend and classmates repeatedly punch and kick him to get him to release her
That Ihsan choked his daughter to unconsciousness and punched Isiah in the face as he protected her was indisputable, due to the video evidence and overwhelming witness testimony.
Had she died, there would likely be a slam-dunk case for manslaughter, at minimum.
But that alone was a long way from proving intent to kill, the vital component that separates murder, or in this case attempted murder, from mere assault.
The jury had to be satisfied, beyond reasonable doubt, that Ihsan and Zahraa intended to kill their daughter when they choked her.
They weren’t, and entered not guilty verdicts after three days of deliberation.
Prosecutors were hampered by the collapse of the ‘honor killing’ claim that served as a powerful motive for the jury to convict.
Deputy Prosecutor Heather Stone made it clear in a memorandum in the leadup to the trial that the state would no longer rely on it, and she wasn’t sure how it became such a big feature of the case.
‘There is no express evidence that such was the motivation of either defendant in this case and the state does not intend to argue such,’ she wrote.
‘Further, the state has no intention of even using the term at trial.’
Zahraa’s lawyer Tim Leary (second from left) and Ihsan’s attorney Erik Kaeding (second from right) did a good job at creating doubt for the jury
Judge Christine Schaller kneecapped the prosecution’s case by ruling the arranged marriage couldn’t be mentioned in the trial
Judge Schaller also ruled before the trial that prosecutors couldn’t bring up the arranged marriage or allow Fatima to talk in detail about a family trip to Iraq when she was 16.
The veracity of the arranged marriage claim is less clear, but it was wholly denied by the defense during the trial.
‘The entirety of the claims appears to be the result of Islamophobia,’ Ihsan’s lawyer Erik Kaeding wrote in his own memorandum.
‘There is no evidence of either honor killing or arranged marriage supported by the evidence uncovered in the investigation of the case.’
Ihsan’s treatment of Fatima at home was also banned from being be characterized as ‘abuse’.
The reason for Judge Schaller’s rulings that kneecapped the prosecution’s case was that their inclusion would unjustly prejudice the couple in the eyes of the jury.
The result was a bizarre situation where everyone outside the court referred to the case as ‘the honor killing trial’ while inside the term was never uttered.
Prosecutor Olivia Zhou didn’t even mention the barbaric Muslim practice in her opening statement, or allude to any motive for murder.
Ihsan punched his daughter’s boyfriend square in the face at the start of the attack, sending him staggering back out of the frame and falling down hard on nearby concrete
Isiah demonstrated with his arms how Ihsan put Fatima in a ‘headlock’ on the ground and choked her even after she lost consciousness
Isiah, pictured behind his father Victor Barnes outside court during the trial, cried on the witness stand as he told how he saved his girlfriend’s life
Fatima’s testimony also didn’t include the backstory she recounted to police in two hours-long interviews in the days after she was attacked.
Had the Daily Mail not obtained 100 pages of police reports detailing her interviews, and those with others, the public would never known the full alleged story.
The evidence provided by Fatima in those interviews created a compelling argument for the thesis presented in Lacey Police Department arrest affidavits.
They detailed her fears of being sent back to Iraq to be married off, after she saw how women were treated there during the trip when she was 16.
Once her father found out she was dating Isiah, an American boy, he pulled her out of school and planned the arranged marriage, the story goes.
When she protested, he allegedly threatened to kill her multiple times as he felt it would bring shame to his family.
None of that was in the trial. The best prosecutors could do was rely on Fatima’s ticket to Iraq being one-way, and her saying she ‘didn’t feel safe’ in her birth country.
Defense lawyers downplayed the significance of the flight by noting that one of the reasons for the trip was to get passports for her younger brothers, saying the tickets were one-way as Zahraa didn’t know how long that would take.
Ihsan (right) speaks with his lawyer Erik Kaeding in court during the trial
Absent a compelling argument for motive, prosecutors were stuck trying to paint Ihsan and Zahraa as so determined to strangle their daughter that the backstory didn’t matter.
‘The state is not asserting that Ihsan Ali showed up on that day with the intention to try and kill his daughter,’ Stone said in her closing argument.
‘There was no premeditation that the state is asserting, but by the time Ishan goes into these events, the state’s position is that that has changed. His intent has substantively changed.’
Numerous prosecution witness accounts focused on the horrifying effects of cutting off Fatima’s airway during the chokehold.
Much was also made of how Ihsan withstood 30 to 40 punches to the head by Isiah alone, plus dozens more from classmates who also kicked and stomped on him.
Isiah claimed Ihsan had to be knocked out cold before he let go, and Wagner spoke of prying the father’s arms apart enough to free her.
In the most gut-wrenching moment of the trial, Fatima took to the stand to testify against her own parents.
‘Did you have any fear?’ Stone asked. ‘Yes.’ ‘Fear of what?’
‘Of dying,’ Fatima choked out, her voice breaking into a sob.
Prosecutors Heather Stone and Olivia Zhou (pictured outside court) faced an uphill battle to get convictions for attempted murder
These are some of the cuts and welts Fatima suffered during the attack
She was barely able to respond ‘no’ when asked if she could say anything during the attack.
‘[I’m] heartbroken for what my dad did,’ she said, sobbing as she described losing consciousness four times during the attack.
If Ihsan wasn’t trying to kill her, why did he choke her for so long and refuse to let go despite the battering he took, the argument goes.
‘She’s unconscious, and he continues to strangle her around the neck for another 15-18 seconds and would have continued to do so even longer but for the intervention of those adults,’ Stone told jurors.
Physicians who examined Fatima in hospital spoke of the severity of her injuries, which left her ordered not to swallow anything for a whole day.
She also had a condition where air in the lungs is forcefully expelled, but due to her airway being blocked it caused the same effect as popping a balloon.
The defense countered with their own expert, saying the lung issue – and other injuries – could have been caused by the efforts to free her, and that they were relatively minor anyway.
‘There’s no nefarious intent. There’s no intent to hurt anybody badly, there’s no intent to kill anybody. There’s an intent to take your daughter home, a 17-year-old daughter who’s run away,’ Kaeding argued in his closing statement.
Fatima under cross-examination. The judge ruled that though she is now 18, she couldn’t be filmed while giving evidence as she was 17 during the incident
The lawyers huddle in a sidebar with Judge Schaller during the trial
The case against Zahraa was even more problematic.
Footage from the bus camera that was damning for Ihsan didn’t clearly show anything Zahraa did as there were so many people standing around.
Prosecutors instead leaned heavily on witness testimony alleging Zahraa had her arms around Fatima’s neck, while the girl mouthed that she couldn’t breathe.
Zahraa’s lawyer Tim Leary disputed this in his opening statement, portraying her as a concerned mother who was comforting her daughter by holding her.
‘You will see my client, her mom, come and attempt to help her daughter,’ he said of the video. ‘She is holding her daughter, she’s not holding on to her neck.’
Leary, both in his opening statement an in cross-examination of Fatima, noted the teenager told police she didn’t think her mother was trying to hurt her.
‘She was just trying to protect me from the chaos,’ Leary quoted.
Fatima admitted this, but told the court it was more that she ‘didn’t want to believe’ that her own mother would try to hurt her.
But Stone in her closing statement insisted Zahraa appeared to also be strangling her.
‘You can’t strangle your child to restrain them,’ she said. ‘She watches Fatima being strangled by Ihsan.
Seconds later it appeared Zahraa had started her attack as the girl seemed to be back on the ground where witnesses alleged she also tried to kill her
Ihsan in police bodycam footage sitting a patrol car. His jacket was torn in the struggle and dirt pressed into one side of his face during the attack
‘She then puts her own arms around Fatima’s neck. She’s not comforting her. She’s strangling her to keep her from fleeing.
‘And when you look at that video, you see she does not provide any aid at any time to her child, zero aid. That is not an effort to comfort her child.’
Leary claimed that when Zahraa chased Fatima and Isiah inside the school, it was out of concern, not an attempt to finish a murder.
‘What does my client do? She leaves her husband behind, she runs into the school. Where is my daughter? Where’s my daughter?’ he said in his opening.
He concluded: ‘That is the accusations against my client for what she did attempting to hold her daughter – in the state’s eyes is the allegation of attempted murder.’
Fatima is in extended foster care and, now an adult, cannot be compelled to return to her parents.
