Sisters Convicted in Shocking Murder

By Paddy Clancy

INTERPOL, the international police organisation, has joined the hunt for Dublin woman Kathleen Mulhall, who fled Ireland before the trial of her two daughters for the killing of her African lover.

Gardai (police) confirmed they have recruited Interpol to help track down Mulhall, who is wanted for questioning about the death of Kenyan Fareh Swaleh Noor and the dismemberment of his body which was cut into seven pieces.

After listening to some of the most gruesome evidence ever heard in the Central Criminal Court in Dublin, a jury convicted Mulhall’s 23-year-old daughter Charlotte of the murder of Noor. Her older sister Linda, aged 31, was found not guilty of murder but guilty of the lesser offense of manslaughter.

They are to be sentenced next month. Charlotte Mulhall will get an automatic life term in jail; Linda’s sentence could vary from anything between a few years to life.

The girls’ father, described by friends as “a decent, working-class man” who was estranged from their mother, hanged himself in Phoenix Park when they were charged with the killing carried out in March last year.

The killing came to police notice only after Noor’s leg, with a sock on the end, was seen floating in Dublin’s Royal Canal 10 days after the attack on him at Kathleen Mulhall’s flat a few hundred yards from Croke Park.

Garda sub-aqua divers retrieved most of the rest of his body in seven parts. Noor’s head and penis were never recovered.

He met his death after a drink and drugs-fueled outing with his girlfriend Kathleen and her daughters three days after St. Patrick’s Day last year.

The trial heard that when they returned to Kathleen’s flat she and Noor began fighting and arguing with each other. Noor began fondling Linda and whispered something dirty in her ear. He was also threatening her mother.

Charlotte, who had been telling Noor to get his hands off her sister, picked up a Stanley blade and cut his throat. As he staggered through a bedroom door, hitting his head on a bunk, she then hit him repeatedly on the head with a hammer while Charlotte stabbed him.

Noor received 22 stab wounds and, according to prosecutors, injuries to “pretty well all” of his internal organs including the heart, liver, stomach and bladder.

At various times the sisters insisted their mother was not involved in the killing but, the jury also heard, they also told officers that their mother kept urging them on.

Charlotte told officers, “Ma kept saying to me and Linda, ‘Please just kill him for me.’ Then she got the hammer and the knife and she gave them to me and Linda but he wouldn’t let Linda go and I cut him on the neck.”

When Noor was dead it took his victims five hours to chop off his head, arms, legs and penis in the bathroom. Linda took the top half of the body into the shower and ran the water while she sawed the head, hacking away until it separated from the torso. Less than two feet away, Charlotte used a hammer and knives to cut Noor’s legs.

The sisters put most of the body parts into bags which were later dumped in the canal during several trips to it.

Linda told cops that she put Noor’s head in her son’s schoolbag and, after kissing the satchel and saying a prayer, left it in a field in Tallaght, a south west Dublin suburb where the sisters lived.

There was evidence that Noor arrived in Ireland 10 years ago and, using a false name, claimed he was a Somali refugee whose wife had been killed. The truth was he was a Kenyan and had left a wife and children behind there.

There was also evidence of his violence towards Kathleen Mulhall and to a former Irish girlfriend.

After the trial details also emerged that Linda and Charlotte Mulhall were prostitutes who sold their bodies to feed addictions to drink and drugs.

If Interpol traces their mother, who is believed to have fled to Britain first –- although police admit they don’t know her current whereabouts -– she will be returned to Ireland where the Director of Public Prosecutions will decide if she should face any charges.