A judge in Lebanon’s highest court has overturned the death sentence that was given to Tarek Houshieh, who was convicted of raping and murdering British embassy worker Rebecca Dykes in Beirut in 2017. No reason was provided for the decision, which was made by Judge Jamal Al Hajjar on Thursday. A hearing has been scheduled for March 5. Dykes, 30, was abducted by Houshieh, her Uber driver, after a night out in central Beirut and her body was found along the Metn highway, a secluded area on the edge of the capital, on December 16, 2017. Dykes, a program and policy manager at the British Department for International Development, was found with no identification documents and a rope around her neck, indicating she had been strangled to death. Police detained Houshieh two days later, who confessed to raping and murdering Dykes. The former Uber driver was sentenced to death by a Mount Lebanon criminal court on November 1. The British embassy at the time said it hoped that the court’s decision would “provide a degree of closure”. Lebanese judges regularly hand out death sentences in cases of murder, but the last time the country carried out an execution was 2004. Most of the time, death sentences end up being a combination of lifetime imprisonment and hard manual labour.