Australia convicts two persons for female circumcision

A court in Australia on Thursday convicted first mother and nurse for carrying out female genital mutilation.


The women, a mother aged 38, and a nurse aged 72, were found guilty of mutilating the clitorises of two sisters aged seven and six.

According to a media report, the convicts were members of a religious sect, called Dawoodi Bohra, a Shia Islamic group with about a million followers around the world who mostly live in India and Pakistan.

It said the Australian leader of the sect, Sheik Shabbir Vaziri, 59, was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact to the illegal procedure.

The report said the young girls told police about the mutilation performed on them two years after the event.

It said the police tapped the phones of the sect and found they planned to send other girls from Australia to India to be cut.

It said the three members that were involved were ordered to surrender their passports and were released on bail pending sentencing at a later date.