Accused murderer Toby Loughnane held knife to Maryam Hamka month before she died

Accused killer Toby Loughnane held a knife to Maryam Hamka and locked her in the bathroom of her Brunswick home a month before he allegedly murdered her, a court has heard.

Toby Loughnane is accused of murdering his girlfriend Maryam Hamka in 2021.

A month before Maryam Hamka died, accused murderer Toby Loughnane “held a knife to her and locked her in the bathroom” of her Brunswick home, forcing family to bash down the door with a baseball bat.

“He had a knife in his hand and he closed the door and wouldn’t open it and she was screaming for help,” Ms Hamka’s sister Hanna told Mr Loughnane’s Supreme Court murder trial on Wednesday.

After Hanna’s partner smashed the door down with the bat on March 6, 2021, she said Mr Loughnane “had run out (and Maryam) was just crying”.

“I had told her to leave him … she said she couldn’t, that she was scared.”

It comes as Ms Hamka’s friend Shane Allan described her sounding “out of it” on the last night of her life, on April 10.

“She didn’t sound safe, I just said to her, ‘Get in a taxi and leave’,” he said of their phone calls at 10.17pm and 11.35pm that night.

A court has heard accused murderer Toby Loughnane held a knife to Maryam Hamka and locked her in the bathroom of her home a month before she died. Picture: Supplied

Despite getting a text from Ms Hamka at 11.41pm that she was “betting (sic) in a taxi soon”, he said “she didn’t turn up”.

Five hours later he received two texts from Ms Hamka’s number – “sorry I blew out” and “just getting in the shower cum over see you M” – that he didn’t believe were written by his friend.

“That wasn’t her, she didn’t talk to me like that … she didn’t use those words,” he said.

It’s the prosecution’s case that Ms Hamka was already dead, and that Mr Loughnane posed as her “to distance himself from the murder and cover it up”.

But Mr Loughnane, through his lawyers, claims Ms Hamka died of an overdose on the drug GHB.

However, her friend Dale Wickham, who said he took drugs with Ms Hamka “every one to two days”, told the jury she “knew very very very well how to use and take drugs to her limits”.

“I know for a fact Maryam wouldn’t overdose on GHB.”

Mr Wickham last saw her lifelong friend just two or three days before her death, when the pair took drugs and went to play the pokies at Brunswick’s Duke of Edinburgh Hotel.

“Her phone would ring non stop, I mean for the whole period of time, four to five hours of Toby constantly calling or texting making threats … trying to intimidate her to pick up,” he said.

“At that stage I told Maryam, ‘Look you’ve got to get rid of this guy, he’s going to kill you.”

In May 2023, the accused murderer showed police where her remains were buried, in a grave at a national park in the Mornington Peninsula’s Cape Schanck.

A few months before her death, on January 16, Mr Allan said he received a flurry of text messages from two unknown numbers believing they were Mr Loughnane.

The texts read, “ur last warning don’t (c) all her again”, “Maryam’s f***ed so r u” and “wait till I get u c***””, along with a picture of a gun.

The jury was told of a horror campaign of domestic violence by Mr Loughnane against his girlfriend, where he once held her hostage in his Brighton apartment and shoved a sock down her throat before she escaped by jumping the back fence.

A staff member from the Dendy Plaza Coles helped Ms Hamka when she turned up battered and bruised inside the supermarket. Picture: Supplied

A Coles staff member, Wendy Ithier, took a “battered and bruised” Ms Hamka inside the Dendy Plaza supermarket and administered first aid in the store room.

“She did say that, ‘My boyfriend bashed me … he stuck his fingers down my throat and a sock down my throat’,” Ms Ithier recalled.

“She thought she was going to die that day.”

Graphic photos of Ms Hamka’s injuries, with bruised eyes and a swollen face, and later a neck brace in hospital, were shown to the jury.

Her sister, Hanna, described seeing injuries to Ms Hamka’s face, ribs and “bruises all over her body” on five or six occasions during her relationship with Mr Loughnane.

When Hanna asked how she got the injuries, her sister replied “that Mr Loughnane assaulted her … they had been fighting and then he assaulted her”.

“His behaviour, he’d become more aggressive, driving past our property and beeping and all that stuff,” Hanna said.

Describing the last time she saw her sister, Hanna broke down in tears.

“She had … two black eyes, I think she had a blood lip, he hit her in the lip, she had a broken nose, swollen face,” she said, crying.

When her sister didn’t return her family’s calls and Mr Loughnane deleted Hanna as a friend from Facebook, the Hamka family reported her missing to the police on April 15.

The trial, before Justice Christopher Beale, continues.