Fragging is the deliberate or attempted killing of a soldier, usually a superior, by a fellow soldier. U.S. military personnel coined the word during the Vietnam War, when such killings were most often committed or attempted with a fragmentation grenade, to make it appear that the killing was accidental or during combat with the enemy. The term fragging now encompasses any deliberate killing of military colleagues.
Peter Kürten was a German serial killer, known as "The Vampire of Düsseldorf" and the "Düsseldorf Monster", who committed a series of murders and sexual assaults between February and November 1929 in the city of Düsseldorf. In the years before these assaults and murders, Kürten had amassed a lengthy criminal record for offences including arson and attempted murder. He also confessed to the 1913 murder of a nine-year-old girl in Mülheim am Rhein and the attempted murder of a 17-year-old girl in Düsseldorf.
Cameron Todd Willingham was an American man who was convicted and executed for the murder of his three young children by arson at the family home in Corsicana, Texas, on December 23, 1991. Since Willingham's 2004 execution, significant controversy has arisen over the legitimacy of the guilty verdict and the interpretation of the evidence that was used to convict him of arson and murder.
Ottis Elwood Toole was an American serial killer who was convicted of six counts of murder. Like his companion Henry Lee Lucas, Toole made confessions which resulted in murder convictions, and which he later recanted. The discrediting of the case against Lucas for crimes for which Toole had offered corroborating statements created doubts as to whether either was a genuine serial killer or, as Hugh Aynesworth suggested, both were merely compliant interviewees whom police used to clear unsolved murders from the books.
Commander K. M. Nanavati vs. State of Maharashtra was a 1959 Indian court case where Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati, a Naval Commander, was tried for the murder of Prem Ahuja, his wife's lover. Commander Nanavati, accused under section 302, was initially declared not guilty by a jury, but the verdict was dismissed by the Bombay High Court and the case was retried as a bench trial. The case is often erroneously believed to be the last jury trial in India, but there were several trials afterwards that used juries, some well into the 1960s. Nanavati was finally pardoned by Vijayalakshmi Pandit, newly appointed Governor of Maharashtra and sister of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Craig Michael Titus is an American convicted murderer. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping and arson in the death on December 14, 2005 of 28-year-old Melissa James, a personal assistant to him and his wife, Kelly Ryan, in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was sentenced in 2008 to 21 to 55 years in prison.
Tara Lynn Grant was a married American woman, mother of two children from Macomb County, Michigan, and a successful consultant at Washington Group International. She became nationally known as the victim of murder by her husband, Stephen Grant, in February 2007.
Brian James Dugan is an American convicted rapist and serial killer active between 1983 and 1985 in Chicago's western suburbs. He was known for having informally confessed in 1985 to the February 1983 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville, Illinois, which was a highly publicized case. He was already in custody for two other rapes and murders, one of a woman in July 1984 and the other an 8-year-old girl in May 1985. He was sentenced to life after pleading guilty to the latter two crimes.
The Solingen arson attack was one of the most severe instances of xenophobic violence in modern Germany. On the night of 28–29 May 1993, four young German men belonging to the far right skinhead scene, with neo-Nazi ties, set fire to the house of a large Turkish family in Solingen in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Three girls and two women died; fourteen other family members, including several children, were injured, some of them severely. The attack led to violent protests by Turkish diaspora members in several German cities and to large demonstrations of other Germans expressing solidarity with the Turkish victims. In October 1995, the perpetrators were convicted of arson and murder and given prison sentences between 10 and 15 years. The convictions were upheld on appeal.
Migrant workers in Kuwait constitute a significant proportion of the population.
Al Jahra is a city located 32 kilometres (20 mi) west of the centre of Kuwait City in Kuwait. Al Jahra is the capital of the Al Jahra Governorate of Kuwait as well as the surrounding Al Jahra District which is agriculturally based. Encyclopædia Britannica recorded the population in 1980 as 67,311. Historically, Jahra was a predominantly agricultural area. There are currently various farms in Jahra.
The University of Washington firebombing incident was an arson which took place in the early morning hours of May 21, 2001 when a firebomb was set off at Merrill Hall, a part of the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture, causing an estimated $1.5 to $4.1 million in damages. By 2012 four of five accused conspirators behind the attack admitted their guilt in plea bargains. A fifth committed suicide in federal detention while awaiting trial.
Thomas A. Sweatt is a convicted serial arsonist. He has set over 350 fires in and around Washington, D.C. most of which occurred in 2003 and 2004, making him one of the most prolific serial arsonists in American history. Following his arrest in April 2005, Sweatt admitted to setting fires for more than 30 years. As of May 2023, he is serving his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution Petersburg Medium in Hopewell, Virginia. Two of his fires killed two elderly women, Annie Brown in 2002 and Lou Edna Jones in 2003, while a third, set in 1985, killed a man named Roy Picott and his wife, Bessie Mae Duncan.
Peter Tredget, formerly Bruce George Peter Lee, is a British serial killer and arsonist. He confessed to a total of 11 acts of arson, pleading guilty to 26 counts of manslaughter. Fourteen of these were overturned in two separate appeals. Lee was sentenced to indefinite secure hospital detention in 1981, and remains detained as of February 2022.
United States v. Hasan K. Akbar was the court-martial of a United States Army soldier for a premeditated attack in the early morning hours of March 23, 2003, at Camp Pennsylvania, Kuwait, during the start of the United States invasion of Iraq.
The honour killing of Sadia Sheikh occurred on 22 October 2007, when a 20-year-old Belgian woman of Pakistani heritage was fatally shot by her brother, an act of sororicide. The murder occurred in Lodelinsart, Charleroi. Sheikh had left her family home after her parents pressured her to marry a cousin who she had never met, later moving in with a Belgian man, but had visited to try to make peace. Her brother, Mudusar Sheikh, confessed to the murder in a 2011 trial, claiming that he had acted alone, but a jury pronounced all four members of the family guilty of the murder and sentenced each to prison. The case has been called Belgium's first honour killing trial.
The murder of Dale Harrell occurred after he was fatally attacked on January 14, 2009, by his wife Marissa-Suzanne "Reese" DeVault in Maricopa County, Arizona. Her trial made national and global headlines. The case was noted as being very similar to that of the murder of Travis Alexander by Jodi Arias, with whom DeVault was in contact and whose murder trial occurred in the same courthouse one year earlier. Though she faced the possibility of a death penalty for her crime, DeVault was sentenced to life in prison. She is imprisoned at Perryville within the Arizona Department of Corrections.
José Misael Roldán Concha, better known as The Jackal of Pupunahue, was a Chilean iron miner known for the brutal murder of a woman and five of her seven children while on probation for an earlier murder. Although he was originally sentenced to death, then-president Carlos Ibáñez del Campo granted him a Presidential pardon, essentially reducing his sentence to life in prison.
Susumu Nakayama was a Japanese serial killer who killed his girlfriend's estranged husband and the latter's girlfriend in 1998, after being paroled from prison for a previous murder conviction in 1969. For the latter crimes, Nakayama was sentenced to death, but died in prison before the sentence could be carried out.
James Phillip Barnes was an American murderer and self-identified serial killer who was executed by the state of Florida for the 1988 rape and murder of Patricia Miller. After converting to Islam and saying that he wanted to clear his conscience, he confessed to the murder in 2005, while already serving a life sentence for the 1997 murder of his wife.
