The United Arab Emirates has executed a woman, who gruesomely stabbed an American teacher to death at an Abu Dhabi mall last year, and also attempted to bomb an American doctor.
Ala'a Badr Abdullah al-Hashemi, 31, was executed early on Monday, after being convicted of terrorism for the killing and also for using social media to spread militant ideology as well as funding militant organisations such as the Al Qaeda, according to Reuters.
The stabbing of American woman Ibolya Ryan, who was Romanian-born, at a mall in Abu Dhabi last December shocked the world, given that attacks on Westerners is not common in the UAE.
Ryan, who was a kindergarten teacher and a mother of two, was stabbed by Ala'a Badr in a toilet of a mall in Abu Dhabi's Reem Island.
Ala'a Badr also targeted an American -Egyptian doctor with a handmade pipe bomb at the latter's residence in Abu Dhabi, but the bomb did not explode.
The UAE woman had reportedly been radicalised through the Internet and was looking to attack foreigners.
She had reportedly been radicalised after listening to "lectures by late Al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and video clips of killings and beheadings", investigators had said, according to AFP.
While she had said she suffered form a chronic mental illness, psychiatric tests had proved that she was aware of what she was doing during the attack.
UAE President Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan gave the approval for Ala'a Badr's execution, after her death sentence was upheld by the State Security Court at the Federal Supreme Court, Gulf News reported, citing the state news agency.
