Australia: Abusive Victorian man jailed for exit-trafficking wife - abandoning her in Sudan

A violent and controlling husband concocted a scheme to get rid of his wife by abandoning her overseas.

He deceived her into believing the couple and their two young children were travelling back to Sudan for a one-month holiday to see their families.

However, after arriving he changed the four flights home to three, secretly withdrew support for his wife’s Australian visa and took possession of her passport and identity documents.

Then, in September 2014 while his wife was at her parents’ place cooking, he took their 6-month-old and 2-year-old with him and boarded a plane to Victoria without her.

It took the woman 16 months to obtain a new visa and return to Australia.

Once she returned he continued to keep the children away from her.

Amid a background of years of coercive control, physical, emotional and economic abuse, a judge found Mohamed Ahmed Omer had decided to effectively discard his wife.

“You devised a scheme to rid yourself of her and abandon her overseas, depriving her of her children and depriving them of their mother,” Judge Frank Gucciardo said as he jailed Omer on Tuesday.

“You treated her effectively as a chattel, which could simply be discarded at your will.”

Omer was the first person in Victoria to be prosecuted for the Commonwealth offence of exit-trafficking.

He pleaded not guilty and faced a County Court jury trial, where he was found guilty in April.

Judge Gucciardo handed Omer a maximum term of four-and-a-half years in prison on Tuesday.

With 196 days already served, Omer will be eligible for parole in less than three years.

He gave a thumbs up to his defence lawyer as the sentence was handed down.

The maximum penalty for the offence is 12 years.

Omer exhibited violent behaviour towards his wife in the two years leading up to the Sudan trip, including physical abuse and threats to kill her, the judge found.

She was dependent on her husband for money as he controlled all of their finances.

He even controlled her phone use, confiscating her phone and limiting her contact with family.

Judge Gucciardo found the “culmination and consequence” of Omer’s pattern of coercive control towards his wife resulted in his exit-trafficking of her.

The woman described her ordeal as “nightmarish” and told the court her nightmare continued as Omer moved their children from place to place to avoid her when she finally came back to Australia.

He then took the children back to Sudan and left them there.

The distraught mother went back to find her kids, where a sharia court stripped her of custody and threw her in prison for three days, she told a pre-sentence hearing.

Judge Gucciardo said the gravity of his offending was high as Omer had exploited and manipulated his wife’s vulnerable state and her dependence on him.

“Your behaviour had created fear, deprived liberty and autonomy, (using) tactics designed to isolate, degrade and control in a targeted and insidious way,” he said.

“This was a serious and contumacious breach of trust on a person who was dependent on you.”

The judge noted Omer had faced an unreasonable delay as prosecutors accepted they had a lack of resources and “manpower” between their investigation and his charge being laid in 2022.