A Pakistani immigrant who threw dogs and cats off buildings as a child has been jailed for stabbing a Sudanese prostitute to death at his Perth home and dumping her body in a harbour.
A Supreme Court of Western Australia jury in September found Muhammad Abdur Rehman Mirza, 24, guilty of murdering refugee mother-of-one Helen Marsuk, 25, and on Thursday he was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years’ jail for the murder, interfering with a corpse and destroying evidence.
Mirza’s trial heard that he organised for Marsuk to come to his family’s unit in Gosnells in December 2022 to have sex with him in exchange for methamphetamine, but when he refused to hand over the drugs before intercourse a dispute broke out and he stabbed her 12 times.
After the murder Mirza hid Marsuk’s body in the bathroom, during which time he invited another woman to the home, asking her to stay the night and using an air freshener to hide the smell of the corpse, The West Australian reported.
He told the woman blood smeared all over the unit and a wound on his arm were the result of him being attacked by an aboriginal man, and later told co-workers a similar story about his injury, saying a man had attacked him during a dispute over a cigarette.
The Harvey Norman salesman then called in sick from work, used products bought at Bunnings to clean the unit, burned Marsuk’s clothes and property and some of his own clothing, threw her mobile phone and the knife in a lake, and then dumped her body in Fremantle Harbour.
After being tracked down by police Mirza first claimed Marsuk was killed by a drug dealer with a “bogan beard” who had come to deliver the meth, and that he was injured trying to save her.
He then admitted that story was false, and told another lie that he killed Marsuk in self-defence when she tried to stab him after discovering he didn’t have the drugs he promised her.
Justice Amanda Forrester said in sentencing that Mirza was found to be at risk of future violent and sexual offending, had narcissistic, Machiavellian, sadistic and psychopathic traits, and that his expressions of remorse were “shallow”.
She noted Mirza was exposed to domestic violence during his childhood in Pakistan, and had told a forensic psychiatrist that he had thrown cats and dogs off the roofs of buildings, and that it gave him a “sense of power”.
The court heard Marsuk came to Australia as a child after born in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, and had planned to study law before suffering mental health issues. After having a son she became an addict and began having sex with men in exchange for drugs.
Header image: Left, Muhammad Abdur Rehman Mirza. Right, Helen Marsuk (Instagram).
The post Pakistani psychopath jailed for murdering African prostitute during meth-for-sex tryst in Perth first appeared on The Noticer.
The NoticerRead More
T1
