Jordanian 'murdered his daughter in abortion bid'

A man in Jordan is reported to have been charged with murdering his teenage daughter after he cut an unborn baby he had fathered from her body.

The man confessed to raping his 19-year-old daughter for five years, judicial sources told the Jordan Times.

Police said the man, who has not been identified, handed himself in to police in the Zarqa region on Sunday.

The charges have shocked Jordanian officials who told reporters they had never seen anything like it.

In his testimony to police in the region north-east of Amman, the 46-year-old man said after he discovered that his daughter was pregnant with his child, he took a carpet-cutter and cut her open with it.

He then removed thefoetus and threw it away, reports said.

"The 19-year-old woman died on Sunday morning of severe internal bleeding after her father performed an abortion to get rid of a five-month-old foetus to hide his crime," a police spokesman told the Agence France Presse news agency.

He stitched up the wound, but he could not stop her bleeding and she died soon after.

When he discovered he had killed his daughter, he went straight to the police and handed himself in, police said.

The man faces the death penalty if convicted, the spokesman said.

"I have been a pathologist for 30 years and this is the first time I have come across such a horrific story," Momen Hadidi, chief medical examiner at Jordan's National Institute of Forensic Medicine, told the Jordan Times.

The man's wife reportedly knew her husband was raping their daughter, but did not go to the police because he threatened to kill her and their other children, aged 17 and 10.

The details of the report were confirmed by judicial sources to a BBC reporter in the region, but the source did not want to be named because they are not cleared to talk to the media.