She wanted 'the world' for her daughter. Instead, she got a landmark prison sentence
CTV
Ruqia Haidari was the baby of the family. The youngest of five children, she was born in Afghanistan in 1999, just a month before her father, a fruit and vegetable seller, was killed by the Taliban.
WARNING: Readers may find some of the details in this story to be disturbing.
Ruqia Haidari was the baby of the family.
The youngest of five children, she was born in Afghanistan in 1999, just a month before her father, a fruit and vegetable seller, was killed by the Taliban.
So desperate was her mother to protect her children that she fled with the four youngest – all aged under five – first to Pakistan, then to Australia, where they settled in Shepparton, a regional town in northern Victoria, in 2013.
Australia offered the children opportunities their mother, Sakina Muhammad Jan, never had. They went to school, learned English, and made friends outside their Hazara community, an ethno-religious minority with a long history of persecution in Afghanistan.
But a decade on, Haidari is dead, and her mother has served the first week of a three-year sentence for forcing her to marry a man against her wishes to study and get a job.
Jan is the first person in Australia to be convicted of forced marriage since it was criminalized in 2013. The court heard there was no suggestion she knew her daughter's husband would kill her just weeks after she moved in with him.
