The police came for him just after 4 a.m.
Wael Ali was still awake, cramming for exams in the small house that served as his sanctuary from the past.
Murder victims’ relationship with their killer.
Wael Ali greets family after being released
District Court filing
See the application for statement of charges filed in the District Court of Maryland for Howard County.
It had been four years since Wael’s identical twin brother, Wasel, was found dead in a wooded area near the Mall in Columbia. To escape constant reminders of the crime, Ali had moved 700 miles away, to Marietta, Ga., where he had enrolled in college and was finally rebuilding his life.
On Sept. 15, 2011, the 23-year-old was staring at his laptop in the pre-dawn darkness when the phone rang. Ali didn’t answer. But when he looked up, he says, he sensed movement outside.
At the back of the house, he heard police radios crackling. A fugitive squad was approaching. The officers had a warrant for his arrest.
From the Cobb County jail, Ali called his family back in Maryland.
“I’ve been arrested for first-degree murder,” Ali recalls telling his father, Gihad.
His father was incredulous. “Who?” he asked. “Who did you kill?”
They said I killed Wasel, he replied.
His father, a tough-minded former colonel in the Sudanese army, sobbed as the anguish of Wasel’s death was rekindled and then immediately eclipsed by the suggestion that he had been killed by his mirror image.
The twins had always been inseparable. Growing up, they’d slept in the same bed, gotten sick at the same time, recited the same prayers at the family’s mosque, enlisted in the Army on the same day. Their names were distinguished from each other by a single letter. Their faces, their close-cropped hair, their skinny athletic bodies — even their DNA — were interchangeable.
Their father didn’t believe “for one fraction of a second,” he says, that Wael had killed Wasel.
Police and prosecutors didn’t believe anything else.
* * *
In 2010, almost 13,000 people were slain in the United States, according to crime statistics compiled by the FBI. Thousands were killed by someone they knew: spouses, children, lovers, friends, and, in just 107 cases, by a brother or sister.
If fratricide is unusual, fratricide among twins is almost unheard of. Dominique Bourget, a Canadian forensic psychiatrist and expert on fratricide, can recall studying only two cases among twins in more than 20 years.
The novelty of such a crime is surpassed only by the difficulty of prosecuting it, especially in the “CSI” age, when juries hunger for irrefutable physical evidence. In the case of the Ali twins, their DNA was identical. Evidence tying one brother to the crime scene could have been left there by the other.
Although Wael was questioned by Howard County police almost as soon as his brother’s body was discovered Aug. 27, 2007, investigators didn’t have physical evidence that he had been at the murder scene. And they had no weapon.
Wasel, 19, had been asphyxiated, an autopsy report said. Investigators would later argue in court that there was only one person furious enough to choke the life out of Wasel with his bare hands: his twin brother, Wael.
* * *
Wasel came first, Wael 15 minutes later. They were born March 16, 1988, in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.
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