By MARIA RAE, Mercury
Law reporter
AN Ethiopian refugee who found out two children were not his, stabbed his wife and then hung himself from a tree.
In sentencing the man yesterday, the judge condemned those in Tasmania’s African community who had shunned the wife after Berakhe Beyene’s violent attack on her.
The Supreme Court in Hobart heard that Beyene and his wife of 27 years had come to Tasmania in 2004 as political refugees.
Their marriage began to break down when Beyene, 59, suspected two of his children were not his. When DNA evidence confirmed his belief, the pair began arguing.
Attempts to repair the strained marriage were encouraged by Ethiopian elders, to no avail.
The couple even tried the ritual of sharing a drink with holy dust in it and agreed to forgive and forget.
On the day of the attack, Beyene had gone to the Migrant Resource Centre seeking help to move out of their Moonah home. He also discovered his wife was going to Adelaide the next day to see their older children.
The couple had dined with her mother and one of their children. While the wife was getting bread out of the oven Beyene stabbed her in the upper chest, the stomach and her leg with a 20cm-long knife.
Beyene then turned the knife on himself.
He went to the back yard where the mother-in-law found him hanging from a tree with a rope around his neck.
She grabbed the knife still in his hand and cut him down.
His lawyer, Rochelle Mainwaring, said Beyene was born in Ethiopia but had lived in Sudan since his late teens.
He raising herds and grew crops.
Beyene and his Eritrean wife had met in Sudan when she was 13 years old, and they had five children.
He had wanted to move to Australia to live a peaceful life after the instability of Sudan.
The marriage had been happy, she said, until Beyene discovered he had not fathered the two youngest children.
“He was unable to accept the children were not his,” Ms Mainwaring said.
He became depressed, upset and confused, and lived with the memory of what he did.
Justice Peter Evans said the attack had an appalling and long-lasting adverse impact on the 40-year-old wife, two children and mother-in-law.
“It has also had an adverse effect on their friendships within the local African community,” he said.
“Incredibly and, most deplorably, this is because of a view taken by some members of the community that the defendant’s wife should have accepted the violence and should not have taken him to court.”
But he said Beyene had been suffering from acute depression, was instantly remorseful and life in jail would be more difficult as he couldn’t speak English.
He sentenced Beyene to 18 months’ jail with eligibility for parole after nine months.
Beyene had pleaded guilty to three counts of committing an unlawful act intending to cause bodily harm to his wife at their Moonah home on July 14, 2006.