By Emily Woods
A mother who left Australia and was stranded in Sudan after being tricked by her husband was jailed in the African country for three days and further traumatised by the long struggle to reunite with her young children.
Mohamed Ahmed Omer took their two children, aged six months and two, with him when he fled back to Australia and abandoned his wife in Sudan in September 2014.
Mohamed Ahmed Omer is the first person in Victoria prosecuted for exit trafficking.Credit: Darrian Traynor
After 16 months separated from her children, the woman finally made her way back to Australia after securing a visa.
But, a Melbourne court heard, her “nightmare continued” as Omer continually moved their children to avoid her.
“The journey to reunite with them became an agonising struggle,” the woman said in a statement read to the County Court on Tuesday.
Two months after her return to Australia, in April 2016, Omer took the children back to Sudan and left them there. The distraught woman went to Sudan six months later to find her children but was confronted with more legal hurdles.
“A sharia court stripped me of custody and prohibited me from seeing my children,” she said. “I was even in prison for three days.”
She said the ordeal “irrevocably changed” her and her children, of whom she now has full custody.
“Losing my children was the most devastating period of my life,” she said.
Omer, 52, became the first person in Victoria prosecuted for exit trafficking – a crime in which a person is tricked into leaving Australia and prevented from returning – after deceiving his wife into travelling to Sudan and leading her to believe she had a valid visa to return.
He had withdrawn his support for her visa and, after arriving in Sudan, he changed the family tickets home.
Omer faces up to 12 years in jail after a jury found him guilty in April.
His barrister told Tuesday’s pre-sentence hearing that Omer’s post-traumatic stress disorder from growing up in a civil war would make prison more difficult.
“It’s accepted this is really a stain on an otherwise blameless life for Mr Omer,” Brett Stevens said. “He acknowledges the intentional deceit that caused the complainant to exit Australia, but that doesn’t mean the jury accepted all of the victim’s evidence.”
Stevens asked Judge Frank Gucciardo to sentence Omer, who is currently in jail, to a good behaviour bond with “some period to serve” in prison.
But prosecutor John Saunders said Omer’s “callous behaviour” needed proper punishment.
“The youngest of the children was still being breastfed; these are particularly damaging acts in the context of a young family,” he said.
Gucciardo said Omer fabricated much of his story to explain his conduct.
He blamed his wife during his police interview, and claimed she had neglected their children and that he left Sudan with the children because her family had threatened him.
“He is simply dissembling, or at one end just fabricating stuff,” Gucciardo said.
Omer will be sentenced at a later date.
AAP
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