The nephew of a woman who killed and dismembered her husband has launched an angry attack over what he described as her “soft” sentence.
Nirmeen Noufl was sentenced on Friday to at least three years in prison after pleading guilty in August to killing her husband, Mamdouh, in excessive self-defence while he was choking and assaulting her.
Taking time already served into account, the 55-year-old will be eligible for parole in October 2027.
Noufl had initially faced a murder charge, but prosecutors later accepted her plea to the lesser offence.
Crown prosecutor Mark Hay told the court that Mr Noufl’s body had reportedly been disposed of in rubbish bins, meaning a murder charge could not be pursued and prosecutors had to accept his wife’s account of what happened.
Following the sentencing, Mr Noufl’s nephew, Khaled Noufal, expressed his anger and warned that his aunt was “gonna be so dangerous to the community”.
“(She) should have got f***ing 25 years (to) life in jail,” Khaled Noufal told reporters outside the NSW Supreme Court.
“If it was an accident, if she was not meant to kill him, why did you f***ing dismember his body?”
Nirmeen Noufl wept as Justice Hamill described the extreme violence and abuse she had experienced throughout her life.
Khaled Noufal, nephew of slain man Mamdouh Noufl, called the sentence handed to his aunt Nirmeen a disgrace.
Justice Hamill cautioned that the sentence could not reflect the extent of Mamdouh Noufl’s family’s loss.
The judge said Noufl’s profoundly traumatic childhood and the severe domestic violence she endured reduced the seriousness of the killing, but stressed that the dismemberment remained a significant factor in the case.
“Disposal of the body in this case was as thorough as it was brutal,” Justice Peter Hamill said on Friday.
“The conduct after the killing is remarkable and chilling … and is also relevant to issues such as remorse.”
A major consideration in determining the prison term was the prolonged abuse Noufl suffered at her husband’s hands, culminating in the attack she said was underway when she stabbed him.
“This was a gravely abusive relationship featuring violence, psychological manipulation and coercive control,” Justice Hamill said.
Noufl wiped away tears in court as Justice Hamill detailed the extreme violence and abuse she had endured during both her childhood and marriage.
The judge had anticipated that Mamdouh Noufl’s family would be disappointed by the sentence: six years and nine months in prison, with a minimum term of three years.
In a victim impact statement submitted to the court, Mr Noufal described his uncle as a “shining light”.
The Noufl home was left in disarray as investigators searched for evidence surrounding Mamdouh’s death and dismemberment.
‘He possessed a rare, pure kindness that touched everyone who crossed his path,’ Mr Noufal’s statement said.
The court however, leant on facts agreed by prosecutors and the killer that the victim held conservative Islamic views and was controlling of his wife and daughters.
Just days before his death in their Greenacre home, he told his wife he met a woman in Egypt months 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 shit, 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, after her October 2024 arrest, that she stabbed him only once in the chest could not be tested.
One of Noufl’s daughters told the court she would uproot her life abroad to help her mother when she is released.
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