Prosecutors will rely on a series of videos recorded by Amirah Droudis to argue the partner of the Sydney siege gunman Man Haron Monis should have her bail on murder charges revoked.
Droudis appeared at Sydney’s Downing Centre on Monday morning to challenge an application by the Office of the New South Wales director of public prosecutions (DPP) to review the bail she was granted in December last year.
The woman, from Belmore, is charged with the murder of 33-year-old Noleen Hayson Pal, who was stabbed and set alight in the stairwell of an apartment complex in western Sydney in April 2013.
Monis, who was killed by police last week after a 16-hour siege in a Martin Place cafe, had been charged as an accessory to the murder of Pal, who was his former wife and the mother of two of his children.
Both he and Droudis were granted bail in December 2013, a magistrate reportedly describing the case against them as “weak”.
In court on Monday, prosecutor John Pickering SC argued a series of videos made by Droudis showed that the “unacceptable risk” she posed to the safety of the public could not be mitigated by strict bail conditions.
The videos, which were shown to a closed hearing, demonstrated the “willingness” of Droudis “to act on Mr Monis’s behalf”, Pickering said.
Droudis sat in the front row of the court wearing the same woollen white cap in which she was pictured last week as police raided her home. She was accompanied by her step brother. Neither made any comment.
The chief magistrate, Graeme Henson, defended the original decision to grant Droudis bail, arguing the brief of evidence against her was incomplete at the time of the hearing and remained so.
He said the court was obliged not to be “overborne by the emotion of the moment” or swayed by “the rants and raves of the people who are ill informed and occupy positions within the media”.
The DPP also provided an amended statement of facts and the sentencing remarks of the court in a previous case in which Droudis was implicated in sending offensive letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers.
The bail hearing continues.
