A father who routinely whipped his children with an electrical cord in a years-long campaign of terror had a ‘complete inability to parent’, according to his lawyer.
The man, who cannot be named, is now ‘pining’ for his sons and daughters and has split from their mother in ‘a complete breakdown of a poorly functioning family unit’.
‘MS’ is being sentenced in Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court after pleading guilty to 26 offences including nine charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
On Tuesday, barrister Penny Marcou read segments of a letter in which middle-aged MS said ‘not a moment goes by’ he did not regret the vicious treatment his children endured.
The Crown described the letter as ‘self-serving’ but MS maintained the regular beatings and other abuse he inflicted on his offspring were ‘the biggest mistake of my life’.
‘I am disgusted at myself and my behaviour,’ MS wrote. ‘It was inexcusable. I should have sought help. I should have done more… but I have let my kids down.’
MS, a Middle Eastern-born repairman, and CS, his Islamic convert wife, raised their children in a household where the smallest act of naughtiness or disobedience was met with violence.
The kids were banned from going to school, socialising with friends, attending public places or shops or playing sport. The girls were not even allowed to cut their hair short.
A father who routinely whipped his children with an electrical cord in a years-long campaign of terror had a ‘complete inability to parent’, according to his lawyer. One the man’s daughters is pictured
The large family lived at a series of rental addresses across Sydney, often in the squalor of open sewage and vermin infestation.
Physical injuries were hidden from the eyes of neighbours, with the children banned from wearing any clothing that revealed skin from the ankle to the collarbone.
All names and any information which might identify the children, including the exact size of the family, cannot be published.
The multiple children, from toddlers to teens, had been kept inside their ‘disgusting and revolting’ homes and subjected to terrible ordeals.
The father’s iron fist saw him lash out with his favourite weapon – a doubled over electrical cord – whenever his children fell short on his slave-like roster of chores.
MS and CS ran a ‘controlling and disciplined household environment for their children who followed strict Muslim religious beliefs’, according to a statement of facts tendered in court.
According to that document, ‘throughout the victims’ lives, they were each the subject of physical abuse and mistreatment’ at the hands of MS and CS.
‘These acts were frequent and often occurred in view of the other victims,’ the statement said.
‘MS’ is being sentenced in the Downing Centre District Court after pleading guilty to 26 offences including nine charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm
The older girls were home schooled in between their roster of chores.
Those tasks included cooking meals, cleaning, vacuuming, mopping, washing clothes, feeding animals and bathing their younger siblings.
One daughter, H, told Daily Mail Australia the boys and girls were basically fed scraps of food and dressed in rags.
‘Hand-me-downs, old things from people we knew or reject stuff from the market,’ she said.
‘The food was the stuff they threw out or would have been fed to animals because it was too old to eat, that my father got for us.’
MS bit and whipped a primary school-aged daughter, called her ‘fat’ and stepped on her face, and punched his four-year-old son in the mouth until he bled for not eating vegetables.
He whipped a 10-year-old daughter on her back, legs and arms for more than 15 minutes, leaving marks which were visible weeks later.
The children’s torment only ended after two of the older sisters secretly contacted police anonymously pleading for help.
The large Islamic family lived in squalor in a house with running sewage and vermin, where the children were enslaved to keeping clean or risk their father’s whipping with an electrical cord
More than once the girls, then aged 17 and 19, backed off from telling police the truth, and then risked the danger of discovery by covertly recording their little brothers and sister’s bashings.
That triggered a raid which led to police uncovering the house of horror lurking in plain sight in Sydney’s suburbia.
MS appeared in court on Tuesday with the assistance of an Arabic interpreter and accompanied by three male supporters.
Ms Marcou said her client’s offending was characterised more by ‘a complete inability to parent’ than rage or lack of emotional control.
The court was briefly closed while a video was played of MS lining one child after another against a wall and flogging them with an electrical cord.
MS had a ‘genuine lack of insight’ into his appalling conduct as a parent until he was taken into custody but was now remorseful, Ms Marcou told the court.
Since his arrest in September 2022, MS had not been allowed any contact with his children, who were taken from the family home and protected by apprehended violence orders.
The girls were initially terrified their parents would learn about their reports to the cops
One email to police read, ‘Hi, hope ur well. I have been abused my whole life and I have had enough of it. But I don’t want the people that have done it to me to go to jail. Even though what they have done to me I will never be the same’
‘He understands that there will be no reconciliation, at least in the forseeable future, Ms Marcou said.
When MS was released on bail in November 2022 after 57 days behind bars he had been prevented from seeing his wife and their marriage had broken down.
Ms Marcou said MS’s criminal conduct and the punishment he had already received had led to a ‘complete breakdown of a poorly functioning family unit’ and he was ‘pining’ for his wife and children.
MS had spent the past two years under house arrest and would be suitable for an intensive correction order rather than full-time custody, Ms Marcou said.
‘He is not a threat to the community in any way,’ she told the court.
Crown prosecutor Michael Clark called for MS to be jailed and said his loss of contact with the children – his victims – could not be considered extra-curial punishment.
‘There would have to remain some hope that there may be some reconciliation in the future,’ Mr Clark told the court.
Mr Clark accepted evidence of MS’s prior good character but noted a disparity between how he conducted himself respectably in public and how he behaved ‘deplorably’ behind closed doors.
CS pleaded guilty eight counts of common assault, two of assault occasioning bodily harm, and three of concealing an indictable offence. In February she was sentenced to a seven-month intensive correction order.
Judge Timothy Gartlemann will sentence MS on Wednesday.
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