Aiia Maasarwe
The horrific murder of a Palestinian student has shocked the nation
MOMENTS BEFORE HER LIFE was brutally cut short on Jan. 16, Palestinian exchange student Aiia Maasarwe was chatting happily on Facetime to her sister Ruba. The two were discussing the Melbourne comedy show Aiia had gone to that evening before heading home on the tram. What happened next has shocked Australia, and shattered the lives of Aiia’s family members.
Tragically, just minutes from home, Aiia was fatally attacked, with police saying the details were too horrendous to share with her family. Hours later, Aiia’s semi-naked body was found at Polaris shopping centre in the north Melbourne suburb of Bundoora.
On Jan. 19, aspiring rapper Codey Herrmann, 20, was charged with her rape and murder. He appeared in the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court and was remanded in custody. From Israel, Ruba has revealed that while still on the phone to her sister, a student at La Trobe University, she’d suddenly heard “screaming and screaming,” then silence.
“We thought she dropped her phone and she got kidnapped,” Aiia’s heartbroken sister Noor Maasarwe told The Age. “But later on, I saw on the news they had found a body. I was praying that it was not her.”
In the family’s home town, Baqa al- Gharbiyye, in Israel, about 1000 people gathered at the local mosque to mourn the cherished young woman. Her Shanghaibased father, Saeed, who’d been due to have
a holiday in Melbourne with Aiia in two weeks, instead arrived to identify her body.
On Jan. 18, he attended a candlelit vigil for his daughter at Victoria’s State Parliament joined by hundreds of Melburnians, disturbed that yet another young woman had been killed in their midst. “Our heart is aching for you, Aiia, an obviously beautiful soul taken too soon,” read one note, among a sea of flowers.
“She, all the time, smiled. She loved the people,” Saeed said through tears, as strangers lined up to hug him.
At the weekend, thousands marched in rallies across Australia calling for greater protection of women, many carrying placards honouring Aiia Maasarwe.
“I am so thoroughly sick to my stomach of men murdering women,” Tom Meagher, whose wife, Jill Meagher, was murdered in 2012, tweeted on Jan. 17. (In June, 22-year-old comedienne Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered in Melbourne after she’d been heading home from a stand-up comedy gig. In March 2015, schoolgirl Masa Vukotic, 17, was stabbed to death in a Melbourne park.)
“The human cost of male violence is staggering, the incalculable social trauma and human misery it engenders is soul destroying,” Meagher wrote.
Aiia’s uncle Abed Kittani told the ABC his family remain crushed at their loss. “The tragedy and horror isn’t easy to bear,” he said. “Instead of coming home with a diploma, she’s coming home in a coffin.”