A 52-year-old Australian man has been sentenced to four years imprisonment after he tricked his wife into travelling to Sudan together with their children for holiday and then left her there without a passport.
Mohamed Ahmed Omer, a Sudanese-born Australian citizen, was sentenced by the county court in Melbourne on Tuesday.
He was the first person in Victoria to be found guilty of ‘’exit trafficking’’.
Exit trafficking is when a victim is tricked out of the country, through using deception as a means of coercion.
According to The Guardian, Omer pleaded not guilty to the charge and denied having deceived the mother of his children, who was abandoned in Sudan for 16 months.
It’s said the husband cancelled her visa to return to Australia without her knowing and once in Sudan, he took her passport and boarded a flight back to Australia with their two children who were both under two at the time.
The publication reported that judge Frank Gucciardo said the Omer’s crime “required a degree of planning”.
“You treated her as a chattel that could be simply discarded. She was grief-stricken and traumatised by the departure of her children with you,” judge Gucciardo was quoted as saying.
Gucciardo said Omer intentionally misled his wife to believe she had a valid visa to return to Australia when they travelled to Sudan in September 2014.
“What you had not told her was, in June 2014, you had withdrawn the visa and her application for a visa would be under threat,” the judge added.
In addition, the British publication said the court heard that when the woman was left alone in a foreign country, she contacted the Australian embassy in Egypt and was told her visa had been cancelled.
She subsequently received legal aid and migration support, the Department of Home Affairs issued her a temporary visa, allowing her to travel to Australia at the end of February 2016.
It was further added that the judge noted Omer was a well-educated and community-minded individual but lacked remorse and insight into the offending.
It was also held that Omer’s likelihood of re-offending was low and his chances of rehabilitation were good if he developed insight into his conduct.