{"id":31827,"date":"2019-02-05T00:23:05","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T00:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=31827"},"modified":"2019-02-05T00:23:05","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T00:23:05","slug":"assassination-of-writer-on-karbala-street-provokes-indignation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=31827","title":{"rendered":"Assassination of writer on Karbala street provokes indignation"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-io-article-url=\"http:\/\/www.arabnews.com\/node\/1447041\/middle-east\" readability=\"80\">\n<p>\nKARBALA: The recent assassination of a writer in the middle of a street in Karbala has provoked indignation in Iraqi cultural circles.<\/p>\n<p>\nThe city\u2019s police force said several fatal shots were fired at Alaa Mashzoub in front of his home on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>\nIn a sign of the sensitivity surrounding the subject, the police immediately tasked a senior squad to investigate, and promised to find the perpetrators.<\/p>\n<p>\n\u201cThis is killing words \u2014 free, honest and beautiful words,\u201d fellow writer Ali Lefta Said said, in reaction to the murder.<\/p>\n<p>\nOn Sunday, intellectuals and artists from Karbala, around 100km south of Baghdad, staged a sit-in.<\/p>\n<p>\nAhmed Saadawi \u2014 whose novel \u201cFrankenstein in Baghdad\u201d has scored success beyond Iraq\u2019s borders \u2014 hit out at the culprits on his Facebook page.<\/p>\n<p>\n\u201cYou really have to be a coward to fire a gun at someone who only has words and dreams,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n<p>\n\u201cShame on the murderers \u2014 and shame on the authorities, if they don\u2019t find and judge them immediately,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>\nTributes have poured in for the prolific novelist.<\/p>\n<p>\nMashzoub was well known in Karbala, whose historic districts he wove with care into his writing.<\/p>\n<p>\nParliament\u2019s cultural commission has said it will monitor the police probe into his murder. But nobody has been willing to point the finger at potential suspects.<\/p>\n<p>\nLate last Summer, the death of four high profile Iraqi women \u2014 including model and social media influencer Tara Fares, whose fatal shooting was caught on camera \u2014 sparked anger.<\/p>\n<p>\nOfficial investigations into those deaths have failed to yield convictions or even publicly announced conclusions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>KARBALA: The recent assassination of a writer in the middle of a street in Karbala has provoked indignation in Iraqi cultural circles. The city\u2019s police force said several fatal shots were fired at Alaa Mashzoub in front of his home on Saturday. In a sign of the sensitivity surrounding the subject, the police immediately tasked&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":31828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}