By Emily Woods
A violent and controlling husband who concocted a scheme to get rid of his wife by abandoning her overseas has been jailed for more than four years, but will be eligible for parole in less than three.
Mohamed Ahmed Omer – the first person in Victoria to be prosecuted for the Commonwealth offence of exit-trafficking – deceived his wife into believing the couple and their two young children were travelling back to Sudan for a one-month holiday to see their families in 2014.
Mohamed Ahmed Omer – the first person in Victoria to be prosecuted for the Commonwealth offence of exit-trafficking – was found guilty in the County Court in April.Credit: Darrian Traynor
However, after arriving, he changed the four flights home to three, secretly withdrew support for his wife’s Australian visa and took possession of her passport and identity documents.
Then, in September 2014 while his wife was at her parents’ place cooking, he took their six-month and two-year-old with him and boarded a plane to Australia without her.
It took the woman 16 months to obtain a new visa and return to Australia. Once she returned he continued to keep the children away from her.
Amid a background of years of coercive control, physical, emotional and economic abuse, a judge found Omer had decided to effectively discard his wife.
“You devised a scheme to rid yourself of her and abandon her overseas, depriving her of her children and depriving them of their mother,” Judge Frank Gucciardo said as he jailed Omer on Tuesday.
“You treated her effectively as a chattel, which could simply be discarded at your will.”
Omer pleaded not guilty and faced a County Court jury trial, where he was found guilty in April.
Gucciardo handed Omer a maximum term of four-and-a-half years in prison on Tuesday. The maximum penalty for the offence is 12 years.
With 196 days already served, Omer will be eligible for parole in less than three years.
He gave a thumbs up to his defence lawyer as the sentence was handed down.
Omer exhibited violent behaviour towards his wife in the two years leading up to the Sudan trip, including physical abuse and threats to kill her, the judge found.
She was dependent on her husband for money as he controlled all of their finances. He confiscated her phone and limited her contact with family.
Gucciardo found the “culmination and consequence” of Omer’s pattern of coercive control towards his wife resulted in his exit-trafficking of her.
The woman described her ordeal as “nightmarish” and said Omer moved their children around to avoid her when she finally returned to Australia.
He then took the children back to Sudan and left them there. When the distraught mother went back to find them, a court stripped her of custody and threw her in prison for three days, she told a pre-sentence hearing.
Gucciardo said Omer had exploited and manipulated his wife’s vulnerable state and her dependence on him.
“Your behaviour had created fear, deprived liberty and autonomy, [using] tactics designed to isolate, degrade and control in a targeted and insidious way,” he said.
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AAP