Berlin - The husband of an Egyptian woman stabbed to death in a German court described Monday how he was unable to help his wife fend off the attacker. "Marwa is dead and I couldn't save her," Elwy Okaz, 32, told the mass-circulation newspaper Bild in the hospital where he is recovering from wounds suffered in the frenzied attack.
His wife, Marwa el-Shirbini, 31, was stabbed 18 times by a German man of Russian descent as she was about to give evidence against him in an appeal case in Dresden.
She was three months pregnant with the couple's second child.
Okaz suffered serious injuries to his lungs and liver in the July 1 attack, and was also shot in the leg by a policeman who tried to overpower the assailant.
"I'm so angry that the policeman's bullet hit me and not the killer," said, Okaz, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute.
Prosecutors are preparing murder charges against the attacker, whom they described as "a fanatical racist."
The man had earlier been fined 750 euros (1,050 dollars) for insulting El-Shirbini at a playground in 2008. She filed charges after he called her a "terrorist," apparently because she was wearing a headscarf.
El-Shirbini's 3-year-old son, Mustapha, who witnessed the knife attack, is being looked after by relatives in Germany.
The woman's body was flown home to Egypt on Sunday evening so she could be buried in her home town of Alexandria.
