A 22-year-old Sri Lankan-born man has been sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment in Queensland, Australia, over an attack in which he struck a stranger on the head with a glass bottle aboard a Brisbane commuter train.
Saranees Sivakumar was released on parole under supervision after the sentence was handed down, having already spent 89 days in custody. He appeared before the Cleveland Magistrates Court by videolink from custody on Monday (July 27) after pleading guilty to affray, Ada Derana reported, citing Australian media coverage of the case.
Sivakumar migrated to Australia as a child and became an Australian citizen last year. The court heard he had moved to Brisbane from Melbourne looking for work, and had been homeless and unemployed.
The April attack
The assault took place on April 25 on a city-bound service on the Cleveland line and was captured on CCTV. Sivakumar and a co-offender, Baddeley Mawhinney, approached a man travelling alone and began talking to him before the encounter turned violent.
The pair punched the victim repeatedly to the head and face and stopped him leaving the train by dragging him back through closing doors, the court heard. They moved to another carriage, then returned and tried to take his bag, at which point Sivakumar struck him on the head with a glass bottle, causing him to bleed.
The court was told the victim was so traumatised by the attack that he has since left Queensland. Mawhinney was earlier sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment for his part in the assault.
Magistrate rejects self-defence claim
Sivakumar told the court he had acted in self-defence. Magistrate Deborah Vasta rejected that submission.
“You’re allowed to defend yourself when you’re required to do that,” she said. “Hitting someone over the head with a bottle is not [self-defence] … It was a very nasty attack on an innocent man.”
The magistrate noted she was constrained by the maximum penalty of 12 months attached to the affray charge, telling Sivakumar that had the ceiling been higher, “I think you’d be looking at more than you got.”
Australia is home to one of the larger Sri Lankan communities outside South Asia, with about 184,800 people of Sri Lankan ancestry recorded in official statistics.
