Bartamaha (Melbourne ):-THE nephew of a former Somalian dictator has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old Melbourne girl on the same night he celebrated his engagement.
Omar Artan had sex with the drunk girl, who had asked him to buy cigarettes for her last October, the Victorian County Court heard.
Artan’s uncle Mohammed Siad Barre, a military dictator, was president of Somalia from 1969 to 1991.
Another uncle was a finance minister during Barre’s reign, the court heard.
When Barre was overthrown as president in 1991, the family fled Somalia, living in a United Nations refugee camp in Kenya for three years.
The family was sent to New Zealand as refugees and came to Australia in the late 1990s, where they lived in a public housing tower, Artan’s lawyer Paul Higham told the court today.
He said Artan, who was a toddler when they fled Somalia, cannot remember the privileged life enjoyed by the family who had servants and drivers.
“He is a young man who was born into the luxury that attends the ruling elite, but really before memory was formed for him, his family were refugees in a camp in Kenya,” Mr Higham said.
Artan had become engaged shortly before the sexual assault and had borrowed a car for the night to take his fiancee out to dinner in the city, he said.
After dinner he had gone back to the fiancee’s place and had stopped for petrol on the way home when he met the girl at the service station.
Prosecutor David Cordy said after meeting the girl Artan drove her and three of her friends to a local reserve.
He dropped the other three off and the girl told her friends she was going with Artan to get some marijuana.
Artan drove down a side street and asked the girl for sex. She refused saying she was 14 years old and had a boyfriend.
Mr Cordy said Artan told the girl he didn’t care and had sex with her.
Artan, 21, of Ascot Vale, pleaded guilty to sexual penetration of a child under 16.
The court heard up until the sexual assault Artan had been an excellent member of the community and had worked in youth programs with the police, which saw him receive an award from the then chief commissioner Christine Nixon.
Mr Higham said his client felt a great deal of shame and there was nothing he could say to explain the offending behaviour.
He asked that Artan not be jailed.
Mr Cordy submitted a sentence of two to three years was appropriate and said some, but not all of it, could be suspended.
In an obituary in the New York Times following his death in 1995, Barre was described as a dictator who left power with his country in civil war and on the brink of starvation.
“General Siad Barre’s rule was marked by a war with Ethiopia, a flip-flop in political alliances from the Soviet Union to the United States, and growing allegations of human rights abuses,” the article said.
Artan will be sentenced on Monday.
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Source:- news.com.au

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