Sentence for hoax bomber reduced
CANBERRA: A Sri Lankan man who threatened to blow up a Malaysia Airlines plane with 222 people on board had his prison sentence slashed yesterday by an Australian appeals court because he had been in a psychotic state and the fake bomb he had brandished posed no danger.
Manodh Marks, 27, was the first person in Australia to be convicted of attempting to take control of an international flight by force and was sentenced in June 2018 to 12 years in prison. He had pleaded guilty to the charge that carries a potential maximum of 20 years in prison.
The Victoria state Court of Appeal reduced that sentence to eight years. Marks has already served half of his reduced five-year non-parole period, after which he will be deported to Sri Lanka.
The three appeal judges found that the sentencing judge should not have treated the offending as having equivalent gravity to using a real bomb.
The appeal judges also ruled that Marks’s psychotic state had reduced his moral culpability, despite it being drug induced.
His lawyer Paul Smallwood told the appeals court Marks was heading home to Sri Lanka when he boarded the flight heading to Malaysia in May 2017.
The former hospitality student had been diagnosed with schizophrenia two weeks before he attempted to fly to Colombo after living in Melbourne for a year.
Marks had been released from a Melbourne psychiatric ward only six hours before his flight took off.