SAN DIEGO  — The daughter of an Iraqi-American man accused of killing his wife in California in what was first investigated as a hate crime denied under cross-examination by a defense lawyer on Monday, April 7, that she ever said she wanted her mother dead.

Fatima Alhimidi acknowledged telling an uncle’s then-girlfriend that she hated her mother because the two had fought over her romance with a local Chaldean Christian boy, a relationship that would be taboo in many Muslim families.

But asked by defense attorney Richard Berkon if she had ever said she wanted her mother dead, the 19-year-old Alhimidi said: “I don’t remember that. I don’t think so.”

The questions appeared to be part of a defense strategy to suggest that the father, 49-year-old Kassim Alhimidi, may not have been the only person with a possible motive for killing the stay-at-home mother of five in her San Diego-area home.

When it was his turn to question Alhimidi, San Diego County Deputy District Attorney Kurt Mechals asked her directly if she had anything to do with the crime.

“Did you kill your mother? Did you tell your boyfriend Ron to do it?” Mechals asked. Alhimidi responded: “No.”

It was Fatima Alhimidi, then 17, who found her mother, Shaima Alawadi, bloodied on the kitchen floor of the family home in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon on March 21, 2012. Alawadi, 32, died several days later.

Furthermore, she said, in the weeks before the murder her parents had often argued, and her mother was seeking a divorce, which her father did not want to grant.