A mother who killed three of her children by deliberately driving them into a lake in Australia has been jailed for at least 20 years.<\/p>\n
Akon Guode, 37, killed one-year-old Bol and four-year-old twins Hanger and Madit in Melbourne in 2015.<\/p>\n
Another child, six-year-old Alual, was also in the car but survived.<\/p>\n
Guode had pleaded guilty to murder, infanticide and attempted murder, but a judge said her motive for the crimes remained unclear.<\/p>\n
“Your betrayal of their trust was catastrophic,” Justice Lex Lasry told Guode in the Supreme Court of Victoria on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“People want to understand why you did what you did, because particularly for parents of young children such action is foreign and unthinkable.<\/p>\n
“In my opinion, your actions were the product of extreme desperation, rather than any form of vengeance.”<\/p>\n
Onlookers and emergency crews tried desperately to rescue the children in the moments after the car entered the lake in the suburb of Wyndham Vale. Guode and Alual were rescued.<\/p>\n
In earlier hearings, the court heard harrowing accounts of what witnesses confronted on the day.<\/p>\n
“They (the children) are floating, they are floating in the water,” one onlooker said in an emergency call played to the court.<\/p>\n
“(They) can’t swim.”<\/p>\n
Joseph Manyang, the father of the three children, testified that Guode was a “loving mother” who would not have harmed the children intentionally and had spoken of feeling dizzy before the crash.<\/p>\n
However, a key witness told police that Guode spoke about killing her children on the day of the tragedy.<\/p>\n
Justice Lasry acknowledged that Guode, who came to Australia as a refugee, had experienced trauma in South Sudan where she witnessed her husband’s murder.<\/p>\n
She had endured an “extraordinarily difficult life”, he said.<\/p>\n
The judge said Guode had been suffering post-traumatic stress, signs of depression and feelings of isolation from the Sudanese community.<\/p>\n
He sentenced her to 26 years and six months in jail, with a non-parole period of 20 years.<\/p>\n
He said it was likely she would be deported after serving her sentence.<\/p>\n
Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"