There must be more (a lot more) to this story from Australia. A judge has ruled that the murder of an 18-year-old refugee from the Sudan was not racially motivated. And, it’s not clear to me what such a ruling in Australia would have meant anyway.
The murder of a Sudanese refugee was not racially motivated despite his killer spraying racist graffiti just hours before the bashing, a judge said.
Just hours before the attack, Clinton David Rintoull sprayed the abusive words on the wall of a house in suburban Noble Park in September 2007.
He later stood outside the house armed with a metal pole and shouted: ‘These blacks are turning the town into the Bronx. I’m going to take my own town back. I’m looking to kill blacks’.
Expressing anger and remorse that she had even brought her son to Australia, the victim’s mother had this to say.
Mr Gony’s mother Martha Ojulo Alama expressed her outrage at the decision.
‘My son was preyed on and killed like a dog on the street and today the justice didn’t give me what I was hoping to hear, what I was hoping that they deserved to get,’ she said, in Sudanese, outside court.
Ms Alama said she could not forgive herself for letting him die a violent death in Australia.
‘He could have died where there is a cause in Sudan … but here someone is killing you for nothing.’
As I said at the outset, there must be more to this story.