A mother has been found guilty of forcing her 20-year-old daughter to marry an older man before he murdered the young woman.
Sakina Muhammad Jan, from Victoria’s north, faced a two-week trial in the county court after denying she coerced her daughter into marrying the man from Western Australia in 2019.
Prosecutors said Ruqia Haidari told her mother she did not want to marry Mohammad Ali Halimi and accused Jan of handing her daughter over to him in exchange for a $10,000 dowry.
Halimi killed his new wife at their Perth home in January 2020 and is serving life imprisonment in WA, with a minimum of 19 years.
The young woman was seen to have “lost her value” due to being divorced, when Jan tried to arrange the marriage, prosecutor Darren Renton previously told the jury.
After a matchmaker became involved, a meeting was arranged with Halimi who flew from Perth to Shepparton on 1 June 2019, to meet Haidari for the first time.
Less than two weeks after this meeting, Haidari was married to him in an Islamic ceremony on a temporary basis, and then permanently married in August.
She had told multiple people she did not want to be married to Halimi, including her mother, two driving instructors, a teacher, counsellor and police.
The jury deliberated for just over a day before returning their guilty verdict on Thursday afternoon.
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Jurors were not told about Haidari’s murder during the trial, but these details can now be revealed since a verdict has been delivered.
Jan will face a pre-sentence hearing at a later date.