Daughter not guilty of murder
Tristan Swanwick
The Courier-Mail
February 17, 2010 10:26am
BREAKING NEWS: A JURY has found Kaihana Hussain, 20, not guilty of murdering her mother and trying to kill her father.
Hussain, 20, had pleaded not guilty to murdering Shaheda Yasmeen Hussain, 41, and attempting to murder her father, Muhammad Hussain, now 53, on October 9, 2006.
She had also pleaded not guilty to an alternate charge of intentionally causing grievous bodily harm to Muhammad Hussain.
The prosecution alleged Kaihana Hussain attacked her parents to gain more freedom so she could convert from Islam to Christianity and move to Sydney to be with her boyfriend.
"Under cross-examination by defence lawyer Dennis Lynch, Mr Hussain said he was "very angry" his daughter planned to convert from Islam to Christianity and disapproved of her relationship with university student Benjamin Miles Thomas Brady," reports AAP.
Shaheda Hussain died at the scene of the attack at the family's Gold Coast unit but Muhammad Hussain was saved after operations on a severe stomach stab wound.
Hussain sobbed in the dock as she waited for the jury to enter the court room.
During the trial, the jury heard Hussain told police she saw her father use a knife to stab his wife twice at the family's rented apartment in Southport, on the Gold Coast.
In the interview, Hussain told police she had taken her father into the bedroom and blindfolded him so she could give him a ``surprise'' gift she brought back from a trip to Bangladesh.
She said while she was looking for the present in another room she could hear her parents arguing.
Her father was talking ``quite aggressively'', she said.
``The next thing I knew, and this happened within like a split second, my dad had the knife in his hand and he stabbed my mum,'' the court heard that she'd told police.
She said when her father came after her he bore a stab wound.
But Dr Hussain denied, under defence questioning, being the one who carried out the attack.