Melbourne’s most violent example of family abuse ends in horror

One of Melbourne’s most grotesque examples of violence in the family home ended in a crime of unspeakable horror. WARNING: Graphic details.

WARNING: Graphic.

One of Melbourne’s most grotesque examples of violence in the family home ended in a crime of unspeakable horror.

It took place under the roof of a ramshackle house in the suburb of Broadmeadows in front of the couple’s three young children — kids so neglected they could hardly speak when authorities found them.

What they witnessed no child should ever have to see.

They watched on with horror on June 17, 2016 as their father, a 36-year-old Islamic State sympathiser, cut out his 27-year-old wife’s right eye and flushed it down the toilet.

They watched as he cut off two fingers on her left hand and slashed her repeatedly with a sharp knife, scissors and a meat cleaver.

They watched as he wrapped her body in a blanket, a plastic sheet and electrical tape and drove it to a nearby tennis club where it was dumped in the bushes for a jogger to find.

The killer, who cannot be named to protect the identity of his victim and their children, was jailed for at least 30 years.

On average, one woman a week is murdered by her current or former partner.

Almost 10 women a day are hospitalised for assault injuries at the hands of a spouse or domestic partner.

Every day in May, as part of Domestic and Family Violence Awareness Month, news.com.au will tell the stories behind those shocking statistics.

The killer lived in a filthy home in Broadmeadows with his wife and two children before committing a heinous crime.

The Broadmeadows murder is a horrifying example of controlling, ongoing abuse that went on behind closed doors for years.

The victim’s sister and brother-in-law told news.com.au the couple met when the woman arrived in Australian from Lebanon. They got married within a month and red flags started appearing.

“My sister came here from Lebanon and met him within a month and got married,” the victim’s sister said. “I came to Australia later and I’d been here for 15 days before he even let me see my own sister.”

The victim’s brother-in-law said he was warned by friends to be careful around the 36-year-old.

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“Everybody I met told me, ‘stay away from him, stay away from him’. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because I wanted to make the relationship work so my wife could see her sister,” he said.

“I thought he was a normal person but he turned weird. When we were alone all he talked about was ISIS, how he wanted to go to Syria, how he wanted to take the family to Syria.”

In the Victorian Supreme Court, Judge Lex Lasry read out depraved details of what the killer did.

“As your children watched, you removed her eye and flushed it down the toilet,” he said, before commenting on the trauma such an act would have caused the two boys and their younger sister.

“It was grotesquely violent,” he said. “What you did was disgusting. It is hard to forecast the impact this will have on your children.”

Judge Lasry said one theory about the removal of the woman’s eye was that she was being made to look like Islam’s anti-Christ. It’s believed the killer told his children she “looked like Dajjal” with her eye missing.

The killer arriving at court after being charged with murder. Picture: Tony Gough

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After the murder, the children and their father drove to a kebab shop and later to get pastries. They paid for them with the debit card belonging to the victim.

It’s bizarre behaviour family members say was typical of a man they described as “weird”, “awkward” and “scary”.

One of the couple’s three children told police that on the night of the murder he was made to follow along while his mother’s body was dumped in bushes. He stayed and looked at the body in the bushes at Dallas Tennis Club “to see if Mummy got up”.

The same boy told his aunty and uncle what happened the night their mum was murdered.

“The oldest boy goes, ‘My mum (was thrown out) of the car then dad took us for kebabs,” a family member told news.com.au. Later, the same boy said he thought his mum was “going to be OK, she’s going to come back”.

The children were themselves beaten by their dad. On the day of his arrest, police performing a welfare check discovered the run-down home they lived in.

The court heard all three children showed signs of physical abuse and told police their father had beat them.

One of the children had bruising across his face and blood around his nose. He was dehydrated. Another had swelling on the left side of his face and blood behind his ear.

The youngest child had burns on her left foot which appeared to be the result of contact with a hot object and had been “left with urine and faeces in her nappy for a prolonged period”.

The victim’s sister and brother in law told news.com.au the children were so badly neglected that they couldn’t communicate.

“They couldn’t speak. They weren’t taught anything, they had broken English,” the children’s uncle said.

Asked if they had anything to say to the man who took their loved one away, one family member offered the following.

“He’s a scumbag. He gouged out her eyes, he did unspeakable things. I don’t know, maybe something went in him. They say the devil goes in people and changes them.”

Sherele Moody, who has documented the violent deaths of some 2400 women and children in Australia for the RED HEART Campaign, told news.com.au many women’s deaths were “entirely foreseeable and preventable”.

“In our country, we spend billions of dollars on terrorism, which impacts so few people and kills even less, but our governments refuse to put the same level of funding into the real form of terrorism that’s killing one woman a week, one child a fortnight and one man a month.”

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