A muslim woman has been sentenced to 42 years in an Australian prison for attempted murder in the name of islam. Known as the “Tiny Terrorist,” Momena Shoma, a migrant from Bangladesh on a student visa, had stabbed her homestay host in the neck while he was napping. She says he was an easy target.
Justice Lesley Ann Taylor slammed Shoma and her Islamic State beliefs as the IS fanatic refused to stand in the dock, handcuffed, shackled and staring unflinchingly ahead through the slit of her black niqab.
Delivering a huge 42-year maximum sentence to the 26-year-old Bangladeshi, Justice Taylor told off the prisoner in a lengthy and pointed sentencing, which appeared to miss nothing.
She told Shoma that instead of being a grand jihadi she was an “insignificant criminal” with “transitory notoriety”.
Shoma became the first person in Australia convicted of violent jihad for trying to murder her homestay host in his suburban Melbourne house with a kitchen knife she’d brought in from Bangladesh.
She stabbed Roger Singaravelu in the neck, intending to murder him, as he took an afternoon nap with his five-year-old daughter in their rumpus room on February 9 last year.
“At the scene, you told police that you had come to Australia to carry out the attack because you were ordered to do so by the caliph of Islamic State,” Judge Taylor said in her sentencing remarks today in the Victorian Supreme Court.
The diminutive Shoma, who comes from an upper-middle-class family in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, had committed a “chilling” and “cunning” attempt to murder Roger Singaravelu, Justice Taylor said.
She said Shoma’s assault was “was an attack on a fundamental value of Australian society”.
But Justice Taylor scoffed at the notion expressed by Shoma in a Whatsapp message before the attack saying she was “gathering courage”.
Judge Taylor said Shoma had hoped her victim would die, had no remorse, had refused to denounce her jihadi ideology and had poor prospects of rehabilitation.
On February 9 last year, Shoma stabbed Roger Singaravelu in the neck at his Mill Park home in northeastern Melbourne after he had become an emergency fill-in host to the international language student under the Australian Homestay Network.
Shoma had only been in Australia eight days after arriving on a student visa to study at La Trobe University when she attempted to fatally stab Mr Singaravelu to “trigger the West”.
Wearing a black niqab and kneeling beside him as he slept in a chair, Shoma had yelled “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and stabbed him so forcefully the knife embedded in and fractured his spine.
The court heard Shoma had brought a kitchen knife all the way from Bangladesh and had practised with it on a mattress days before the attack.
In an email to her sister back in Bangladesh, Shoma wrote “I can get over my fear … I love u for the sake of Allah … delete these emails”.
Shoma then downloaded videos about IS executions over two days leading to the afternoon of February 9, 2018, when Mr Singaravelu was asleep with his daughter on a mattress in the rumpus room.
After her arrest in Melbourne, Shoma’s younger sister allegedly stabbed a policeman who went to the family home in Dhaka to further investigate Shoma.
Asma-ul Husna, 22, who is also known as Shumona, reportedly yelled “Allahu Akbar” as she stabbed an officer who had come to the family apartment.
After her arrest, she allegedly told police, “You are disbelievers. The rule of Islam should be established in the country. If necessary, we should do jihad.”
Over at jihadwatch.com, Robert Spencer has been chronicling this case, with such headlines as “Australia: Muslima who stabbed sleeping man says she was “acting on behalf of the Caliphate’” and “Australia: After jihad stabbing, Home Affairs Minister says “This scourge is with us for a long period of time’”
I suppose she is just one of the many peaceful immigrant refugees who is simply trying to have a better life, as the left would say. Somehow they’ll try to blame Trump.
