An Egyptian Muslim NDIS business owner could walk free next October after being sentenced for killing and dismembering her husband, and dumping his body parts in bins across Sydney.
Nirmeen Noufl, 56, was originally charged with murdering husband Mamdouh Noufl, 62, inside their home in Greenacre, but made a deal with prosecutors last month to plead guilty to manslaughter after claiming that she acted in self-defence and was the victim of domestic violence.
On Friday NSW Supreme Court Justice Peter Hamill sentenced Noufl, who covered up the death with the help of a friend and bought investment properties in the Middle East afterwards, to six years and three months’ imprisonment, with a non-parole period of three years.
Noufl will be eligible for parole in just over a year, as the sentence was backdated to the time of her arrest in 2024.
A family member reacted to the sentence with anger outside court, saying “f*ck Australia, f*ck the law, she should be doing 25 to life”, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
“Look what she did to him, if it was an accident, if she was not meant to kill him, why did you f*cking dismember his body?” he asked.
Other family members told the court losing Mamdouh was an “unimaginable nightmare” and that they were upset because they had no way to mourn him, because his body had never been found and he had no grave to visit.
Mamdouh was reported missing in July 2023, and police alleged after arresting Noufl, who ran NDIS and child-minding businesses, that she was motivated by financial gain as she had accumulated unexplained wealth after Mamdouh’s disappearance.
She was charged with murder, but at a court hearing in late August prosecutors accepted Noufl’s plea of guilty to manslaughter on the basis they could not disprove a partial argument of self-defence.
According to a statement of agreed facts, Noufl told psychiatrists she was trying to get away from Mamdouh and felt her life was in danger when she fatally stabbed him in the chest with a tool that was being used to renovate their home.
The documents stated Noufl had suffered years of domestic violence abuse, that she had asked for a divorce because her husband was planning to marry another woman in Egypt, and that he was “controlling of his wife and daughters”.
“He held conservative Islamic views with respect to the role of women in the home and community and was strict in the application of these views to his female relatives,” the fact sheet stated.
The agreed facts also stated a friend of Noufl’s referred to as Witness A found her with a bleeding lip and swollen jaw at 2.50am on the night of the killing, and saw a tarpaulin on the floor covered in blood, with pieces of a circular saw underneath.
Witness A later helped Noufl clean and bleach the scene, and cover up the killing by lying to Mamdouh’s family during a trip to Egypt two weeks later, saying he was sick.
Later, during a conversation between Noufl, a relative, and Witness A, she confessed to the killing and said: “We had a fight and he was laughing at me.”
“All my life I have dedicated to the kids and him, and he just treated me like shit. Spat at me,” she said, according to the court documents.
“I had enough. I have been trying to fight for us to be normal, to ignore the voices in my head.”
Header image: Left, Nirmeen Noufl. Right, Mamdouh Noufl.
