Conviction appeal of ‘baby terrorist’ dismissed despite husband's ‘love triangle lies’
Self-described ‘baby terrorist’ Alo-Bridget Namoa has failed to get her New Year’s Eve Sydney stabbing plot conviction quashed.
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Self-described “baby terrorist” Alo-Bridget Namoa has failed to get her stabbing plot conviction overturned.
Namoa and her jihadi Bonnie and Clyde husband Sameh Bayda were jailed for planning a 2015 New Year’s Eve terror attack in Sydney when they were both 18, and they have since been released.
The 22-year-old challenged her conviction, but on Monday the NSW Supreme Court of Criminal Appeal ruled there was practically no “fresh evidence” proving she’s the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
Namoa said Bayda bamboozled her during their sentencing by revealing he’d only pretended to go on a suicide mission to win her back from a Turkish guy named “Riz”, who had also proposed.
But three appeal judges ruled this evidence mimicked Bayda’s police interview where he said “I never intended to hurt anyone” and “I’m too soft man”, which Namoa could have relied upon during their trial.
The couple got married in an Islamic wedding ceremony one day before Bayda was to become a “martyr”, and Namoa argued the trial judge erred in ruling that spousal immunity protecting a husband and wife from conspiracy charges did not apply to them.
But the appeal judges ruled that under law, a husband and wife are each a “person” and can be guilty of conspiring with each other.
“The underlying basis for the rule that legally husband and wife were “one person” has not been true in Australia since, at the latest, 1975,” Justice Anthony Payne SC said.
Namoa and Bayda broke up around early December 2015 and the volatile couple got stuck in a love triangle when she started dating Riz, court documents show.
With Namoa torn between her new flame and Bayda, he said he decided to raise the stakes and told her: "If you don't marry me, I'm going to do an attack and die.”
The Crown said Bayda was only downplaying the seriousness of his crimes to get a lighter sentence, and his evidence “should be approached with great caution.”
Justice Payne said although Bayda’s story was credible, that didn’t make him a “pretence conspirator” and a jury would not have acquitted Namoa simply because she envisaged his New Year’s Eve attack would be on a grander scale than in fact he’d planned.
Despite Bayda’s manipulation of his young bride, the lovers still had a genuine shared intention about the planned terrorism, Justice Payne said.
The judge also agreed that Namoa could have been taken in by his false boasting, shown when she sent him an encouraging text saying: “I wanna do an Islamic Bonnie and Clyde version on the kuffs (an insulting reference to non-Muslims) haha.”