Karen Nettleton
Karen Nettleton had a knock on the door this week.
"The messenger told me that the man my 13 year old granddaughter was forced to marry, Mohamed Elomar, was dead."
And so was the man her Australian daughter Tara fell madly in love with and converted to Islam for - Khaled Sharrouf - the father who posted a picture of his young son holding the severed head of a Syrian fighter.
Karen Nettleton, the woman who helped her daughter and four grandchildren sneak out of the country to join her husband in Syria, is now pleading with the Prime Minister to let them come home. Last year Nettleton flew with them as far as Malaysia to avoid suspicion, then returned home while they went on to Syria.
Before he left Australia, Khaled Sharrouf, who was a bodyguard for notorious businessman George Alex, introduced Nettleton to Alex and he hired her as his bookkeeper.
But when she appeared before the Royal Commission into Union corruption last year, she didn't know anything. "An interview was arranged for me by my daughter's husband" she told the commission but she had no information to give them about the weekly $2500 cash payments that were made out to officials of the CFMEU. She just did what she was told.
Asked outside the inquiry if she had heard from her grandchildren in Syria, she said "I have no comment."
Fast forward to 24 June 2015. "My daughter made the mistake of a lifetime. Today she is a parent alone in a foreign and vicious land looking after a widowed 14-year-old and four other young children."
Tell someone who cares.
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