*** Son charged in killing of US Navy staff member in Bahrain | THE DAILY TRIBUNE | KINGDOM OF BAHRAIN

Son charged in killing of US Navy staff member in Bahrain

AP | Manama

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

US prosecutors have charged the son of a civilian Navy staffer in Bahrain over her stabbing death in the kingdom.

Federal court documents accuse Giovonni Z. Pope, 27, of stabbing his mother to death at her off-base apartment on January 31. Contact details for Pope could not be immediately found, and his listed public defender did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Court documents only identify his mother by the initials E.A., describing her as a civilian Defense Department employee at Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the home of the US Navy’s 5th Fleet. She had worked there since September 2017.

An affidavit by a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service says the woman’s co-workers became worried when she didn’t come to work on February 1. Investigators discovered her body under a blanket in her apartment, repeatedly stabbed.
 
Bahraini police later arrested Pope. He told Bahraini investigators at one point that he killed his mother as she “was blocking him from achieving his goals by not letting him return to the United States to work on his clothing business,” the agent’s affidavit claims. He had allegedly used his mother’s credit card after the killing to purchase airfare back to the US to visit his girlfriend.

Bahrain had declined to prosecute Pope if the U.S. tried him, the agent said. U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas M. DiGirolamo of Maryland issued an order Thursday for him to be brought back to America to face trial on a murder charge.

The US Embassy in Bahrain and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday, nor did Bahrain’s Interior Ministry.