Rahim Alfetlawi shoots stepdaughter Jessica Mokdad for not obeying Islam

Rahim Alfetlawi blames Saddam Hussein.

​Jessica Mokdad was a 20-year old woman who didn't like the traditional Muslim rules that her stepfather Rahim Alfetlawi tried enforce at their Coon Creek home, so she left last year to live with her natural father in suburban Detroit.

But in late April, Alfetlawi made his way to Detroit to help Mokdad move some of her late grandmother's belongings into her grandmother's home, and all did not go well at the family gathering.

Alfetlawi had an obsession with the way Mokdad dressed in western clothing; she wouldn't cover her head with a hijab, or scarf, and she preferred shorts and shirtsleeve shirts, police in Michigan say. The two got into an argument, Alfetlawi pulled out a 9 mm pistol, and shot her dead.

The 45-year-old man turned himself in almost immediately, and confessed. He was arrested and charged with with first-degree murder.

But now he's claiming to have mental issues stemming from humiliation and torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime in 1990s Iraq. And he went before a Michigan judge yesterday to seek a court-ordered metal competency evaluation.

Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Cataldo didn't sound sympathetic.

What drove Alfetlawi to shoot his stepdaughter was, "religious obsession rather than a psychological issue," he told the Detroit News. "He appears clearly to have been obsessed with her and her Western ways."