Victorian dad Mohamed Ahmed Omer jailed for four-and-a-half years for exit trafficking wife

Mohamed Ahmed Omer will spend at least three years and three months behind bars for stranding his wife in Sudan after tricking her into an overseas holiday.

Mohamed Ahmed Omer will spend at least three years and three months behind bars for exit trafficking. Picture: Craig Dunlop

A father who wanted to sponsor another woman on a partner visa when he tricked his wife to go on a family holiday to Sudan before abandoning her overseas has been jailed for four-and-a-half years.

Mohamed Ahmed Omer will spend at least three years and three months behind bars after he secretly cancelled his wife’s visa and convinced her to go on an overseas holiday before fleeing back to Australia with their young kids and her passport.

The first Victorian convicted of exit trafficking, Omer — who has since remarried and now has no contact with his children — was taken away by custody officers in the County Court on Tuesday.

A jury found Omer, 52, guilty of exit trafficking by deception after hearing how the controlling and threatening husband claimed to his depressed wife that he’d booked a holiday for their young family to Sudan, where her loved ones lived, in September 2014.

He’d earlier suggested she travel to Sudan alone, but she refused to go without her children, particularly as her youngest was still breastfeeding.

Believing they were on a one-month holiday, the wife spent the day cooking at her family home when Omer took their small children, aged just 7 months and 21 months, and returned to Australia with plane tickets he had reissued two days earlier.

She later learned Omer, an Australian resident, had revoked his support for her visa three months earlier when he asked authorities how long it would be until he could sponsor another partner into the country.

He was told five years.

Dr Mohamed Ahmed Omer abandoned his wife in Sudan. Supplied Facebook

His wife, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, spent the next 16 months fighting to get back to Australia to be reunited with her children.

When she finally did so with the help of a migration agent and legal aid in February 2016, the court heard Omer took the kids back to Sudan less than two months later, leaving them there.

Judge Frank Gucciardo noted how the wife, who then rushed back to Sudan, spent a “nightmarish” further two years trying to get her kids back home to Australia, with her family having to sell their ancestral land to have the children returned to her care.

The court heard how one of the children now suffers nightmares, while the other needs “constant reassurance” after being apart from their mother.

Meanwhile, the wife, who faced false claims by Omer that she’d abused the children, had suffered years of anxiety and fear over her kids’ wellbeing, and remains “in a state of despair” to this day.

Judge Gucciardo found the young age of Omer’s children when he forced their separation, depriving them of their mother’s care, was one of the aggravating features of his crime.

Omer remarried in 2019 — five years after he sought information about sponsoring another partner — to a woman who lives and works overseas for the United Nations.

His new wife told the court Omer was a “decent and hardworking” man who “believed he was acting in the best interest of his family” when he committed his crime.

“He believed he was doing the right thing,” the new wife told the court.

Judge Gucciardo said his new wife’s comments reflected her affection for him, but had flown in the face of the evidence put before the court.

His Honour noted Omer’s charitable contributions to the Sudanese community and his extended family, and said he had good prospects of rehabilitation.

But he said Omer’s lack of remorse and insight required specific denunciation, as did his crime to deter others who may consider committing the same offence.

Omer, who had faced a maximum of 12 years jail, will be eligible for parole in mid-2027.