Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop,
ABC
Updated November 6, 2012, 2:21 pm
An inquest has heard a Sydney mother laughed about the disappearance of her infant daughter.
Rahma El-Dennaoui was 20 months old when she was reported missing in November 2005 from her home at Lurnea, in the city's south-west.
Today her mother Alyaa El-Dennaoui took the stand to give evidence for a second time at the coronial inquest examining her daughter's disappearance.
The Glebe Coroner's Court was played a phone conversation from earlier this year in which Mrs El-Dennaoui laughed when her sister joked that a friend might have abducted the girl.
"Am I not allowed to laugh?" Mrs El-Dennaoui told the inquest when asked whether she saw anything wrong with the conversation.
In another intercepted phone call played today the child's father, Hoseyn El-Dennaoui, discussed the search for his daughter's body and was asked whether police would dig up a property.
"Maybe they will, but god knows how many bodies they'll find," he said.
Counsel assisting the coroner, Robert Bromwich SC, suggested the property in question was a farm owned by the family.
Mrs El-Dennaoui broke down as she told the inquest how police had accused them of killing their daughter.
But Deputy State Coroner Sharon Freund said she found it hard to reconcile Mrs El-Dennaoui's emotion with the jokes she had made about the disappearance.
Mrs El-Dennoui has also been questioned about inconsistencies in her evidence.
The inquest heard Mrs El-Dennaoui told police her daughter must have been taken through her bedroom window by someone standing on a cable drum.
Today Mrs El-Dennaoui said she had moved the drum there in the days before the disappearance, but in her previous evidence last April she told the inquest she had not put it there.
Counsel assisting the coroner, Robert Bromwich SC, accused her of giving "two completely different accounts".
Mrs El-Dennaoui replied that she might not have been paying attention last time.
The inquest continues.
Rahma's family's phone calls 'secretly recorded', inquest hears
Peter Bodkin
The Daily Telegraph
October 23, 2012 12:56PM
POLICE have been secretly recording the phone calls of Rahma El-Dennaoui's family in an attempt to uncover if her disappearance nearly seven years ago was staged to look like an abduction, a coroner was told this morning.
An inquest into the young girl's disappearance and possible death re-started this morning followed several days of hearings in April and May.
Today counsel assisting the coroner Robert Bromwich SC revealed phone calls between Rahma's family members had been intercepted throughout the last court dates - and for at least a month afterwards.
Mr Bromwich said the inquiry would now focus on the theory Rahma's that disappearance had been arranged to look like an abduction had taken place.
The last reported sighting of the 20-month-old girl was at her family's Lurnea home about 2am on November 10, 2005, when her father Hosayn put her to bed next to her two, older sisters.
A hole, large enough for a child to be lifted through, was found cut in the flyscreen above the bed the next morning when her siblings woke to find their sister missing.
Glebe Coroner's Court was this morning played a series of recorded phone calls between the missing girl's aunt Rouba Dennaoui and a family friend.
Speaking in Arabic, the two women discussed rumours Mrs Dennaoui's husband Ahmed - Hosayn El-Dennaoui's brother - "went missing" the night and early morning Rahma disappeared, when he claimed to be at work.
"This will send my husband to the place, behind the sun, do you know what I'm saying?," Mrs Dennaoui told her friend.
The women attributed the claims to another friend Samia El-Nabouche, who today agreed the women were speaking in a "secretive way".
Ms El-Nabouche admitted hearing the rumour about Rahma's uncle, but she denied being the one spreading the story or having discussed the man's absence with Mrs Dennaoui shortly after the disappearance.
"With this case, if something is obviously going to lead to anything - what happened to the girl - obviously it is serious," she said.
"I'm not going to sit there and shut my mouth about it ... because we all have a right to know where this girl's gone."
The inquest continues today.
Missing Tot's Dad joked about Cashing In
AAP
October 24, 2012, 6:53 pm
The father of missing Sydney toddler Rahma El-Dennaoui repeatedly joked about collecting the reward offered for information about the child's disappearance, an inquest has heard.
A secretly-taped telephone conversation between the girl's father, Hosayn El-Dennaoui, and his brother-in-law and cousin, Said Dennaoui, was played in Glebe Coroner's Court on Wednesday.
The 19-month-old was last reported seen at her parents' home in Lurnea, in Sydney's southwest, in the early hours of November 10, 2005.
Police began intercepting relatives' phone calls before an inquest began in April this year and continued until at least June.
Earlier on Wednesday, an aunt of the toddler, Rouba Dennaoui, admitted she referred to the inquest using the phrase "cutting the grass" during phone conversations with Hosayn El-Dennaoui because she "had a feeling" her calls could have been intercepted.
In one call, Hosayn El-Dennaoui is heard talking to his brother-in-law Mr Dennaoui in Arabic about the "150,000, they haven't transferred them to me".
He then suggests that another relative should confess and "we'll collect half the reward money".
Under questioning from counsel assisting the coroner, Peggy Dwyer, Mr Dennaoui admitted this was a reference to the $250,000 reward offered by the NSW government for information about Rahma's disappearance.
Mr Dennaoui said the "jokes" were "very stupid and silly" and that Mr El-Dennaoui was a grieving father.
"He's very upset. He want to know what happened to his own child," he said.
The court heard Mr El-Dennaoui was a strict father who tried to "teach the kids the right way".
But Mr Dennaoui said he had never seen Mr El-Dennaoui lose his temper or demand silence from his many children.
The court also heard that telephone charge sheets showed Mr Dennaoui and his wife Wahede Dennaoui called each other on the night of November 9, 2005, when Mr Dennaoui said he was home and believed his wife to be home.
The court had previously heard from two witnesses, neither of whom can be named for legal reasons, that Wahede Dennaoui had stayed at the El-Dennaoui house until about 2am on November 10, 2005, and that the toddler had been sick with a high fever.
Earlier on Wednesday, Rouba Dennaoui told the court that any suggestion her husband, Ahmed Dennaoui, had gone out for hours on the night of Rahma's disappearance was untrue.
She told counsel assisting the coroner, Robert Bromwich, SC, she was a light sleeper and would have woken if her husband had left the house during the night.
Mr Bromwich told her that by referring in a "secretive" way to the rumour that Ahmed Dennaoui had some involvement in the toddler's disappearance, she appeared concerned "not that it is untrue, but that it's true and you want to suppress it".
The inquest continues before Deputy State Coroner Sharon Freund.
Rahma Witness Grilled over Phone Taps
AAP
Updated October 23, 2012, 5:44 pm
A witness at an inquest into the disappearance of a Sydney toddler has been questioned about taped phone calls in which the role of the little girl's uncle was raised.
Rahma El-Dennaoui was about 20 months-old when she disappeared from her bed in the early hours of November 10, 2005.
She had been sleeping with her sisters in the front room of her family's Lurnea home in Sydney's southwest.
The inquest into her disappearance has previously heard police found large cuts to a flyscreen window in the room, big enough for a toddler to be lifted through.
"The possibility that in fact there was no abduction of Rahma El-Dennaoui at all would be a focus of the inquest," counsel assisting the coroner, Robert Bromwich SC, told Glebe Coroners Court on Tuesday.
Witness Samia El-Nabouche testified that when she last gave evidence to the inquest, in April, she had been aware of a rumour Ahmed Dennaoui, one of Rahma's uncles, took the child.
The court has previously heard evidence Mr Dennaoui was away from home for some or all of the night the toddler disappeared.
Secretly taped telephone conversations revealed Mr Dennaoui's wife, Rouba, was concerned Ms El-Nabouche might repeat the rumour, Mr Bromwich told the court.
"Had you agreed with Rouba that you would, in court, deny knowledge of any such rumour?" he asked Ms El-Nabouche on Tuesday.
"Only because I didn't know anything," Ms El-Nabouche replied.
Under questioning from David Evenden, who represents the missing toddler's father, Hosayn El-Dennaoui, Ms El-Nabouche said she was "scared in case things were going to get bigger".
She also told Coroner Sharon Freund she was "scared in case someone kidnapped my children as well".
Relative "Joked" about missing Rahma
AAP
November 5, 2012, 5:34 pm
A relative of missing Sydney toddler Rahma El-Dennaoui urged the girl's father to tell him if he had "done something" to her so he would know what to say in court, an inquest has heard.
Tamer Dennaoui, a second cousin of Rahma's father Hosayn El-Dennaoui, told him: "If you're hiding something from me and you've done something to this girl, tell me so I know what to say (in the inquest)".
The comments were made during secretly recorded phone calls between Mr El-Dennaoui and his cousin last May that were played in Glebe Coroners Court on Monday.
Rahma disappeared from her home in Lurnea in Sydney's southwest in the early hours of November 10, 2005.
The 20-month-old had been sleeping alongside her sisters in the front of the house, and police found cuts to a flyscreen window above their bed that were big enough for a toddler to be lifted through.
Speaking through an interpreter, Mr Dennaoui said his comments to Mr El-Dennaoui were a "joke" to make him laugh.
"Making him laugh about his missing baby child is a good thing?" Deputy State Coroner Sharon Freund asked.
Mr Dennaoui denied this.
Earlier he told the inquest, "If we don't laugh we would die. We need to laugh."
Counsel assisting the coroner, Robert Bromwich SC, put it to Mr Dennaoui that he was offering to help cover up any possible wrongdoing by Mr El-Dennaoui.
"You seem to be asking him to let you know if he's done something to Rahma and for him to tell you what your evidence should be when you come to court," Mr Bromwich said.
"If he told me anything he had done to his daughter, I would come to court and tell the truth," Mr Dennaoui replied.
He said he knew "100 per cent" that Mr El-Dennaoui had nothing to do with Rahma's disappearance.
"But because of what the media was saying and the police, we had our suspicions," he said.
"We had our doubts and I just wanted to make sure."
Mr Denaoui also told the inquest he was aware that police were at one point "digging up the farms of all the relatives who had farms".
"(That's) because the police have this idea that Hosayn killed his daughter," Mr Dennaoui said.
Mr Dennaoui gave evidence to the inquest in May this year.
The inquest continues on Tuesday.
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