Amirah Droudis murder trial: Witness recreates terrifying scene in court

A MAN has described the terrifying moment he watched a woman stab another woman with a 20cm knife in a violent “rage”.

Amirah Droudis and Man Haron Monis.

THE terrifying scene a man witnessed during the killing of Man Monis’s first wife by an “angry” woman in a “rage”, stabbing the victim with a 20cm bladed knife, has been recreated in court, during sensational evidence in a Sydney murder trial.

Wayne Morris related the “surreal” scene of the murder on the landing outside his apartment, with the victim pleading for her life before “everything just went quiet”.

Mr Morris, who told the court there was blood “all over the body and all over the wall” of the landing outside his flat also described his fear when he confronted the female killer “in Middle Eastern clothing” and tried to stop her setting the victim’s body on fire.

Mr Morris said he was watching football alone in his flat after 4pm on the afternoon of Sunday, April 21, 2013 when he heard a loud scream in “a lady’s voice” yelling “I’ve got children, I’ve got children”.

Mr Morris went to the peephole of his second floor flat in the western Sydney suburb of Werrington and saw a woman stabbing in a downward motion “a person on the ground with her hand up trying to defend herself”.

Mr Morris, who is the first Crown witness to give evidence in the murder trial of Lindt Cafe gunman Man Monis’s second wife Amirah Droudis, stood up in court to dramatically recreate the murder he had witnessed.

Droudis, 37, has pleaded not guilty to the murder.

Bringing his hand in a stabbing motion from his head down to his waist, Mr Morris said he saw the female assailant “going up and down like that” with the knife.

The woman, who had a “chubby” face and “plump” body and was wearing a long black hijab, screamed back at him during the encounter.

He estimated the knife she held had a 20cm long blade.

“It was big,” he said, and the female killer “was leaning over the body”.

“It happened really quick,” Mr Morris said. “To me, I saw it, it was so surreal. I saw at least three or four stabs and the person on the ground just went quiet.

“Everything just went quiet and I don’t know where the knife went and all of a sudden there was a plastic bottle in the lady’s [female assailant] hand and she was pouring ... it all over the body.”

Mr Morris said the liquid was in a 600ml Coca Cola-style bottle with no label, and his fears about the building being set alight made him leave his flat to confront her.

“Obviously I was afraid and I didn’t go out there at first,” he told the court. “She had a knife. I couldn’t believe it.

“I thought, I am on the top floor, I’m in trouble here. I ran out. I tried to scare her off lighting up the body.

“I just said ‘don’t’ and she screamed back at me ‘No! You go back in there’.

“The rage in her voice. She was angry at me. She was very angry. She made me feel like I’d done something wrong.

“It was a really scary moment.”

Amirah Droudis.

Man Haron Monis. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

Mr Morris said after he refused to return back to his flat, he then saw the woman throw something on the body of the victim which “just lit up straight away”.

He said flames engulfed the body and the wall of the landing which were also covered in blood.

“There was blood everywhere, all over the body, all over the wall.”

Asked by Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC whether he had ever seen a woman wearing Middle Eastern dress and fitting the description of the plump woman in the hijab who committed the murder, Mr Morris said he had.

A few months earlier he had seen a woman of similar body shape and clothing with a man in the stairwell of the flats.

Mr Morris went on to describe his escape following the murder from his burning apartment block, during which he thought he would die.

He said that after witnessing the murder and seeing the female assailant run off as the body and the landing catch on fire, he ran back into his flat.

He grabbed his phone to call Triple-0.

“I thought I was in big trouble,” he said, recalling the moment in court.

“I ran to the balcony. As I ran I could see black smoke coming under the door already.

“I ran out to the balcony and screamed out for help trying to see if there was a way down.

“I thought I was going to die, I really did.”

Mr Morris said he then heard the sound of an approaching fire engine.

“I rang my ex-wife ... to tell my daughter that I loved her,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion in the witness box.

Mr Morris said that when a fireman eventually made it to the door of his flat to escort him from the building, the officer guided him past the body on the landing.

“He told me if you have a weak stomach, close your eyes and I said, ‘I seen it all,’” Mr Morris said.

“I did get a glimpse of her leg. She was obviously burned and I screamed, ‘I don’t want to look, I don’t want to look.’”

The prosecution played a video of Mr Morris two days after the murder at St Mary’s Police station in western Sydney where he was shown a computerised line-up of photographs of 20 women.

All the women had dark hair and each of their images were shown on the screen to Mr Morris for 20 seconds.

Mr Morris paused at the image of one woman, saying “the darkness of the eyes” was familiar to him.

At another image, number 18, Mr Morris asked the police officer to freeze the image and said, “That’s her. That’s her, a hundred per cent.”

Mr Morris grabbed a tissue and weep, and say “I have had that image in my head since Sunday”.

Asked by a police sergeant what the woman in the image had done, he said, “she stabbed a woman and set her alight”.

Neither of the two women in the images Mr Morris stopped at were Ms Droudis.

Another witness on Tuesday, who also lived in the block of flats where the murder took place, described a woman in a Middle Eastern headdress emitting a moaning sound and running from the landing where the smell of burning and smoke was emanating.

Peta Drzewiecki said she and her flatmate Jonathan Truupold had been in their flat when she heard a woman’s screams.

When Mr Truupold went to investigate, he told her to get some flour because he could smell kerosene or a chemical fire.

Ms Drzewiecki said she dialled Triple-0 and then went to the front door of her flat to see been both Mr Truupold and a woman in a “burkha” coming down the stairs.

She described the woman as having large rounded eyes, “very defined” eyebrows and was of slender to medium build.

The woman “was making noises, kind of like a moan or a whimper, repetitive ... ah, ah, ah, but highly pitched”.

When Mr Truupold arrived back at the flat, she noticed an orange glow and the smell of smoke from the floor above.

The pair found their cat and evacuated the building.

The post mortem revealed the 30-year-old was stabbed 18 times to her chest, shoulder and arm, but five of the wounds punctured her vital organs — her heart, lung, diaphragm, pulmonary artery and liver.

The autopsy result was read as a statement of fact undisputed by Droudis at her trial in the NSW Supreme Court for the alleged murder of the first wife of the Sydney siege gunman.

The murder victim’s body showed “heat exposure, extensive charring and deep burns”, Ms Droudis’s lawyer Mark Ierace SC told the court.

Police allege Ms Droudis stabbed the victim in an apartment block at Werrington in western Sydney, and then poured petrol over the body and set it alight.

Wearing a black and white cardigan, grey T-shirt and navy skirt and with her hair scraped back into a bun, Ms Droudis sat impassively in the dock reading a document as her counsel read out the statement.

Mr Ierace said that all the witnesses to the murder who were neighbours of the Werrington flat sublet by Monis had identified the assailant as a woman and that she had used Redhead Extra Long 90mm matches

Wayne Morris, who lived opposite Monis’s flat looked through his peephole and then came out of his unit to see a woman in a hijab stabbing another woman and then pouring liquid over her.

The post mortem on the victim’s body revealed there was no smoke in her trachea or lungs meaning that she was already dead by the time she was set alight, Mr Ierace told the court.

He said that following the victim’s death, Ms Droudis had “exercised her right to silence” and declined a police interview as well as a request to participate in a police identity line-up parade.

The trial continues on Wednesday.