Yaser Said again denied killing his two teenage daughters and believes his arrest and prosecution are part of an international political conspiracy, he said in a new true crime TV show.
Said, 67, is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the shooting of Sarah and Amina Said on New Year’s Day 2008. Yaser was on the lam from authorities for more than a decade and on FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list before his capture in August 2020 at a Denton County family home.
Speaking for the first time since his conviction, Said is the subject of the second episode — “‘Honor’ Killings” — of Court TV’s original series “Interview with a Killer,” which airs Sunday at 7 p.m. CST. The episode also includes footage from Said’s 2022 trial in Dallas County and home videos of his daughters.
“I want my voice to be heard,” Said said, dressed in all-white prison garb. “My case is being used to achieve cheap political points.”
The murders were dubbed so-called “honor killings,” a narrative that spread quickly and was further fueled by the 2014 documentary “The Price of Honor,” and when the FBI called the murders honor killings on their website. That characterization was later refuted by law enforcement at Said’s trial.
From behind glass and through a prison telephone at the William C. McConnell Unit in Beeville, Said told investigative reporter David Scott that he is the victim of a ploy to go after “honor killing” laws in the United Arab Emirates.
“The FBI didn’t do their jobs,” Said told Scott. “Irving police, they hide [sic] something. The media was not honest in this case — especially in this case — to achieve political point.”
Said added: “I didn’t do crime [sic] … I didn’t murder nobody.”
Sarah and Amina were found bloodied and slumped over in their father’s cab parked outside the Omni Mandalay Hotel in Las Colinas, which is part of Irving. Amina, 18, was shot twice and Sarah, 17, was shot nine times.
Said, who is from Egypt, was controlling and abusive toward his daughters and didn’t want them to have American boyfriends, according to testimony at his trial. Days before they were killed, Amina and Sarah fled Texas — with the help of their boyfriends — because they feared their father but later returned.
The teenagers had made outcries of abuse before; “He will, without any drama or doubt, kill us,” Amina wrote in an email to her Lewisville High School history teacher.
In the interview with Scott, Said alleges the email and allegations of abuse were fabricated. He also said he didn’t have a gun the night of the killings — at odds with his own testimony at trial.
Said said when he took the witness stand at his own trial, and reiterated to Court TV, that he’d taken the girls out for dinner when he sensed a car, or two, trailing his orange Jet Taxi cab. Said told jurors he feared for his life, pulled into the cab stand of a strip club and left, abandoning his daughters.
“They wanted to be average teenagers, average American girls,” said Neena Nejad, director of “The Price of Honor.” “They had dreams, they had hopes, they had ambitions — things they wanted to do in life.”
Amina and Sarah have been described as smart, bubbly and spirited. The sisters were honor students who dreamed of becoming doctors.
