Mother gets 26-year jail term for drowning children in lake

Australian government has jailed a mother for 26 years for murder. The mother who escaped from conflict and owned up to killing three of her children and trying to kill a fourth by recklessly driving the car conveying them into a lake received her sentence on Tuesday.The convict is Akon Guode, who settled in Australia having fled civil war in South Sudan, drove her vehicle into the lake in a Melbourne suburb in 2015, an incident which claimed the life of his three sons: a year-old son Bol and four-year-old twins, Hanger and Madit.Sympathizers helped recover the mother and five-year-old daughter Alual from the submerged vehicle.Justice Lex Lasry, in her judgment, offered that the 37-year-old was suffering from a post-traumatic stress syndrome but could not understand the reason she plunged into the lake.“The sentence I’m about to impose, is in some respects inadequate to reflect the gravity of what you’ve done, yet at the same time excessive given your mental state and your background of hardship and desperation,” Justice Lasry said.He said that “these are obviously grave offences”.“These children trusted you as their mother as they were entitled to do. Your betrayal of that trust had catastrophic consequences whatever the true reasons were for your consequences.”Her counsel said Guode suffered critical psychological shock from the civil war.Accounts of witnesses supported that Guode had been receiving threats from the separated wife of the children’s father, a man she had a long relationship with and had separated herself from the Sudanese community.