A Muslim husband who killed his estranged wife during a fight inside their Sydney home has been sentenced to just three years in jail after claiming he couldn’t remember what happened.
Ahmad Hodroj, 41, was originally charged with murdering mother-of-three Amira Moughnieh, 30, in Bexley in the city’s south on July 5, 2023, but prosecutors dropped that charge when he agreed to plead guilty to domestic violence-related manslaughter earlier this year.
He was sentenced in the NSW District Court on Thursday where Justice Leonie Flannery SC accepted that he “blacked out” during the killing and gave him a sentence of five years’ imprisonment with the three-year non-parole period, meaning he could walk free in July 2026, news.com.au reported.
The court heard that Hodroj had no criminal record or prior history of abuse and was diagnosed with “local associative amnesia” by a psychologist, resulting in him having “no memory” of the incident.
Judge Flannery said in sentencing that she could not find that Hodroj was the initial aggressor, but said “his act was intentional and voluntary”. She found he had good prospects of rehabilitation and a low risk of re-offending.
Ms Moughnieh’s exact cause of death was unable to be determined, but the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy noted blunt force injuries and “features suggestive of external pressure to the neck”, according to court documents tendered in a bail application last year.
Hodroj was found with a bleeding nose and scratches on his face, and his lawyer Greg James KC told the court “we don’t know if the scratch marks were aggressive or defensive … or what”, and that there was no evidence to determine what had happened during the fight.
Mr James said his client had shown remorse with his early guilty plea and described him as a “conscientious and diligent spouse” who had acted reasonably before the killing.
Ms Moughnieh moved to Australia from Lebanon and married Hodroj in 2014, but left him one year before she was killed, moved out of the family home and found a job as an aged care support worker at Muslim Care in Bankstown.
On the day of her death she drove to the Bexley home to pick up her children, but Hodroj asked her to come in and talk about the “property aspect” of their divorce. She had just become an Australian citizen.
She called her lawyer to check it was legal to go inside, and the lawyer said there was no restraining order but asked: “Do you feel safe to do that?”
“Yes, this is not an issue,” she replied, and the lawyer testified she did not sound concerned or stressed during the 58-second phone call in Arabic.
About 25 minutes later Hodroj called his brother-in-law, who came over and found him with blood under his eyes and coming out of his nose.
“Look after the children … I don’t know what happened. Amira is inside,” Hodroj said, according to court documents.
“I was talking to her, and she started to scream. I don’t know what happened.”
The brother-in-law called Triple-Zero and when paramedics arrived they found Hodroj in the foetal position.
Hodroj did not respond to police at the scene when asked what happened, and declined a police interview.
He will be eligible for parole on July 4, 2026.
Header image: Left, Ahmad Hodroj. Right, Amira Moughnieh (supplied).
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