They then arrived at the house, and Ibrahim got into an argument at the front door with Paniora and Paniora’s mum, Tia Panapa.
“You are ugly and I will make you ugly!” the defendant yelled at her girlfriend’s former partner before walking back to the car, retrieving the Molotov cocktail, lighting the rag stuffed inside it and throwing it at the woman’s mother.
The bottle hit Panapa’s leg, causing her pants to catch on fire. She rolled on the lawn until the flames went out.
The bottle hadn’t exploded as intended, so Ibrahim ran to grab it again and this time threw it in the direction of her partner and her partner’s ex. Her girlfriend’s head, neck and shoulder caught fire.
“See what you made me do?” the defendant yelled before grabbing scissors and adding, “Is it me or is it Judy?”
All three victims were taken to Middlemore Hospital, Ibrahim’s girlfriend described as suffering serious injuries. Nelson remained hospitalised for four days but has since made a full recovery, authorities said.
Defence lawyer Harvena Cherrington had sought home detention for her client, and the Crown did not oppose, but Judge John McDonald had other thoughts during the November 2022 sentencing hearing at Auckland District Court.
“The report writer assesses you being [a] low risk of reoffending. I take issue with that,” Judge McDonald said. “In all my years, both as a lawyer where I was a prosecutor and on the bench, I have never come across a position where because of a breakup of a relationship, one party sets quite deliberately out with petrol and Molotov cocktail to seriously injure the party that has left them.
“It is highly, highly unusual in this country.”
Ibrahim had moved to New Zealand at age 8, she and her family were refugees from Iraq’s Kurdish region. A cultural report submitted by a family friend ahead of her sentencing noted that revenge is “regarded as part of self-defence, if not justice” in Kurdish culture and that conflicts are normally dealt with outside the courts.
“I, in no way, wish to downplay what I have been told in this email,” the district court judge said. “It is sufficient to say in New Zealand it is not normal for people to deal with matters such as a breakup of a relationship in the way that you did ...”
“One is not given a credit just because the offending occurred as a result of a breakup of a relationship, or what you thought was going to break up your relationship. I can give, in my view, little credit [to] what is contained in the email.”
The judge read aloud from victim impact statements from two of the three victims.
“She tells me that she still has flashbacks and nightmares back to the day when she was burnt by you,” he said of the defendant’s former girlfriend. “She became dependent on sleeping pills because of the nightmares and flashbacks she had. She considered she is lucky to be alive as a result of what you did to her.”
Paniora, meanwhile, said she had been unable to leave her house for five weeks, terrified Ibrahim would return to make good on her threats.
“You have now, by your conduct, literally scarred the lives of these two other women,” Judge McDonald said, adding that the need to deter and denounce such conduct was “paramount”.
During a hearing in the High Court at Auckland earlier this week, Ibrahim’s lawyer argued to Justice Brewer that the sentence her client received in district court was manifestly excessive, not giving enough credence to Ibrahim’s cultural report.
Brewer disagreed, suggesting that the sentence might have even been “manifestly inadequate”.
“A Molotov cocktail is self-evidently a very dangerous and cruel weapon,” Brewer wrote in his decision. “The potential for serious harm, or even death, to Ms Panapa if the rag had come out of the neck of the bottle and the contents of the bottle had ignited explosively is obvious.”
By Brewer’s calculation, the end sentence should have been two years and eight months’ imprisonment instead of two years and four months. However, he decided not to alter the end sentence — in part because it would have exceeded the maximum possible sentence that had been promised Ibrahim during a prior sentence indication hearing.
“In the circumstances of her case, that would be unfair,” he wrote. “There is a need for finality.”
