Source : Perth Now news
The lasting effects of ongoing domestic violence will weigh heavily on the sentence imposed on a mother-of-eight who admitted to killing and dismembering her husband.
Nirmeen Noufl will be sentenced on Friday after pleading guilty in August to killing her husband Mamdouh with excessive self-defence while she was being assaulted.
The 55-year-old has been in custody since her arrest in October 2024 when she was originally charged with murder before later admitting to the lesser charge.
A key factor in the length of her stint behind bars will be the sustained history of abuse she suffered at her husband’s hand, culminating in the attack she said she was sustaining when she stabbed him.
NSW Supreme Court Justice Peter Hamill indicated on Monday that members of Mr Noufl’s family would likely be disappointed with the sentence he imposes.
“I hope all of you understand … there will seem to be a gap between the loss you have suffered forever and the sentence I impose,” the judge said.
Mr Noufl held conservative Islamic views and was controlling of his wife, according to the case’s agreed facts.
Just days before his death in their Greenacre home, he told his wife he met a woman in Egypt years earlier whom he planned to marry.
But he denied Noufl’s request for a divorce.
When he returned home later that day, they got into an argument and he assaulted her, choking her as he pinned her to the ground, Noufl later told psychiatrists.
“All my life … he just treated me like s***, spat at me,” the 55-year-old told a confidante after the killing.
“I had enough.”
Noufl dismembered her husband’s body using a saw and disposed of it in multiple garbage bags across southwest Sydney.
His body was never found and her claim that she stabbed him only once in the chest could not be tested.
One of Noufl’s daughters told the court she would immediately uproot her life abroad and stay in Australia to help her mother attend psychiatric appointments, should she be released.
“If she were to be released tomorrow, I would cancel my flight back,” the daughter, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, said.
