July 11, 2014
A 35-year-old Iranian immigrant has been charged with murder in Australia after repeatedly stabbing another Iranian to death in a crowded shopping mall near Sydney.
The accused killer arrived in Australia illegally by boat in February 2010. He is one of the few Iranian boat people to win legal status and to be allowed to stay in Australia. The murder could well increase public demands to boot all boat people out of Australia.
The accused killer was identified as Kazem Mohamadi-Payam, 35. The dead man was Nabil Naser, 40.
News reports said Naser was the former husband of the woman Payam was living with before the murder. She spoke with the media but has not been publicly named.
Police said the accused killer had bought the knife in the shopping center just before the killing.
Witnesses said Payam had a huge knife, which some described as a machete, that he repeatedly plunged into the other man’s chest and then left in his chest.
“There was blood everywhere,” one witness said.
The woman at the center of the conflict said she separated from the dead man in 2010 and only met Payam the next year and thus Payam had nothing to do with the split up.
The woman met reporters in her home but was unable to explain what had happened to cause the knifing. “Kazem is really nice,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald of the accused killer. “I want to help him. He’s really good. I don’t know what’s happened.”
She said she and her late husband had a six-year-old son. It wasn’t clear if the couple had divorced or were still just separated.
She said the dead man suffered from a drug problem. She said she had no idea what prompted Payam to kill Naser.
But during Payam’s brief court appearance Tuesday, it was explained that the two men had arranged to meet in the shopping center to discuss visiting arrangements for the son. Payam apparently bought the knife while he was on the way to the meeting.
The crime scene was in the cosmetics section of the Westfield Mall in Parramatta, a Sydney suburb.
Shoppers were alerted to the killing in progress as they heard screaming with one woman yelling: “He’s killing him, he’s killing him!”
Leaving the knife in the man’s chest, the alleged killer calmly removed his own shirt, lit a cigarette and made a cellphone call as he waited for police, whom he then taunted.
A witness told reporters, “He kept plunging the knife in his chest, in and out, and paced up and down the shopping center screaming at police,” adding that the victim was stabbed three to four times.
A shopper having coffee with a friend nearby said he watched in horror as the man paced next to the body “like an animal protecting its prey”.
“I thought, ‘This bloke is going to jump’,” the witness told The Daily Telegraph.
Another witness said the man taunted officers when they arrived, calling out: “What are you scared of?”
Police approached him with Tasers drawn, yelling: “Get on the ground!”
“He got on his knees and lay down. They put him against a roller door and then took him away,” the witness said.
From the stabbing to the arrest was only about 20 minutes, The Telegraph said.
