Kuwait Times

Published Date: July 22, 2007
By Hanan Al-Saadoun

KUWAIT:  Kuwaiti police yesterday arrested an Egyptian man, suspected of raping 18 children, on board a flight to Egypt.  Dubbed the 'Hawally Monster', Hajjaj Al-Saadi, 27, was nabbed at dawn at Kuwait airport as he boarded a Jazeera Airways flight to the Egyptian city of Luxor.

Speaking at a press conference yesterday at the Criminal Detectives Department, Acting Manager Brigadier Sheikh Ali Al-Yousif Al-Sabah told the media that Al-Saadi had confessed to raping all the 18 children. "We had been collecting information about his identity and what he looked like. Our prime suspect was a 27-year-old Egyptian man named Hajjaj who worked as a gym instructor at a health club in Jabriya," he said.

Investigators led by First Lt Mohammad Al-Nisf contacted the club and found that the suspect had been recently fired for sexually harassing a young girl, Sheikh Ali said. He added that no case had been filed in this regard and the child's family did not know of the incident, which had been kept a secret to save the club's reputation. "However, detectives got the suspect's address in Hawally from the club's administration and checked it to find out that he had moved out three days earlier," Sheikh Ali said, noting  that detectives later received a tip from informed sources warning that Al-Saadi was planning to leave the country for "a long vacation".

Airport detectives were alerted and they waited until all passengers boarded the plane including the suspect, who was fastening his seatbelt when detectives asked him to get off the plane. "It's not me...test my DNA," Al-Saadi blurted on realizing he was surrounded by police detectives, which confirmed he was the wanted man. "Detectives had not even accused him of anything yet, when he said that," stressed Sheikh Ali. "His DNA matched the sperm stains on the clothes of all the 18 victims," he said, adding that the suspect also confessed to observing the girl swimming at the club he worked in and that when he tried to molest her, she had screamed.
 
Al-Saadi had earned the nickname "Hawally monster" after a spate of rapes of boys and girls aged 10 years or less in Hawally, although no such cases had been reported for the past six months. Al-Saadi's first "gruesome molestation", according to Sheikh Ali, was more than a year ago, and his last one was a week ago, as 16 assaults took place in Hawalli governorate while two more were in Farwaniya governorate. Kuwait police had been trying to track him down for around a year on suspicion he lured children to rooftops where he raped them, terrifying the residential neighborhood mostly inhabited by foreigners.