Israel said Gazans could flee to this neighbourhood – then it was hit

Published

2 years ago

December 21, 2023

admin

As smoke rose into the overcast skies of Deir al Balah in Central Gaza on 5 December, the whine of an aircraft could still be heard overhead.

The Musabeh family’s home had been destroyed.

“The scene was horrific, fires burning in the house,” eyewitness Mohammed Abu Musabeh told Erem News, a UAE-based news organisation.

Among the survivors was an infant girl, Layan, a relative of Mr Abu Musabeh, who said she was blown onto a neighbour’s roof by the force of the explosion.

“How will this child continue her life after learning what happened to her family?”

Days earlier on 1 December, a temporary ceasefire had collapsed. In preparation for an invasion of southern Gaza, Israel published an interactive map which divided the territory into hundreds of small zones.

The map, Israel said, would be used to give clear and precise evacuation orders to try to keep civilians in the densely populated Gaza Strip away from active combat zones.

Using on-the-ground footage, satellite imagery and mapping software, a Sky News visual investigation found that Israel’s evacuation orders have instead been chaotic and contradictory and that a neighbourhood in Deir al Balah was hit one day after the IDF said evacuees could flee there.

Our investigation comes after a separate strike in Gaza was caught on camera by a Sky News team. It too came in an area that was supposed to be safe.

‘No safe place in Gaza’

Responding to a request for comment on our findings, the Israeli army did not deny striking the Musabeh home.

A spokesperson for the IDF said: “The IDF will act against Hamas wherever it operates, with full commitment to international law, while distinguishing between terrorists and civilians, and taking all feasible precautions to minimise harm to civilians.”

In response to our investigation, the United Nations told Sky News that it is already investigating 52 similar incidents in areas where the Israeli army told civilians it was safe to evacuate to.

“This is exactly why we as the UN have been saying that there is no safe place in Gaza,” Ajith Sunghay, head of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, told Sky News.

Chaotic orders

After the temporary ceasefire, Israel faced growing international pressure to limit civilian harm.

The IDF’s solution? The interactive map with each zone having a unique numeric ID.

On 4 December, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told journalists that the map would indicate “where civilians in a specific area should go to avoid being in the crossfire”.

Civilians were told to learn the number assigned to their neighbourhood and listen out for evacuation orders via social media.

Questions were immediately raised about how Gazans, who have suffered persistent internet outages, would access the online map, and how they could safely move between areas as instructed.

The UN has not officially recommended that Gazans relocate to areas suggested by the IDF, as the zones have not been agreed with all parties to the conflict.

“One of the fundamental requirements of a safe zone is that all parties agree to a particular place to be safe,” said Mr Sunghay.

On 1 December, the day hostilities resumed, the Israeli army began releasing evacuation orders.

Musabeh home hit

The Musabeh family’s neighbourhood is located in section 128 on Israel’s interactive map. It was never included in any of the IDFs evacuation orders issued on social media.

On 4 December, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesperson said on X the IDF would allow “humanitarian movement of civilians” along the coastal road from Khan Younis to Deir al Balah.

The Musabeh home lay in the heart of Deir al Balah, less than 300 metres from Shuhada street – a road explicitly marked by the Israeli army as a route by which civilians could safely reach the city.

The day after that post, on 5 December, the Musabeh home was hit.

‘I don’t know what happened to my son’

A neighbour said that their son had gone to the Musabeh home to ask for water.

“Then the airstrike happened,” the neighbour told al-Araby. “The dust came at us and cars were thrown into the air. […] I don’t know what has happened to my son.”

The footage below, captured by Gaza-based journalist Yosef al-Saifi, shows the immediate aftermath: a woman and two children calling for help on top of the ruined home, a street covered in rubble, and a car on fire.

One man runs with a young girl in his arms, her body limp and her arms badly burnt. Another man pulls a motionless boy from beneath the rubble.

The video below, also recorded by Mr al-Saifi, shows another casualty being carried, also seemingly unresponsive. A fourth casualty is placed on a blood-soaked stretcher, as firefighters tackle a blaze.

Footage of the incident verified by Sky News, including some which is too graphic to publish, shows 11 casualties in total – nine of them apparently unresponsive, including three children.

The spokesman for al Aqsa hospital told Al Jazeera Mubasher that 45 people were killed in the blast. Sky News has been unable to independently verify the exact number of those killed.

Preliminary research carried out by Airwars, an organisation specialising in the verification of airstrike casualties, found online tributes to one of those killed in the attack, Mohammad Kamal Abu Musabeh and further posts about the injured infant Layan. Information online surrounding the identity of those killed has been scarce.

A neighbour of the Musabehs told al Araby that the home had been housing between 70 and 80 people, many of them displaced from elsewhere in the Gaza Strip.

Damage seen in satellite imagery

The neighbour attributed the bombing to an Israeli aircraft, as did a report by Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Eyewitnesses reported a single explosion, and footage verified by Sky News shows that the damage was extensive. The upper floor of the building had collapsed, and its walls were blown out onto the street below.

Visible damage to the Musabeh home can also be seen in satellite imagery taken on 3 December and 6 December.

No remnants of munitions were available for Sky News to conclusively determine whether the IDF was responsible for the attack.

Two experts told Sky News that, based on the footage available, the damage was consistent with an airstrike.

“It was a large [explosion] to have caused that much damage,” says Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

“It was not an errant rocket or artillery shell. It would be consistent with a large air-delivered munition.”

J Andres Gannon, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, agrees.

“Based on the footage provided, the damage seen is consistent with what we would see from a missile strike with a fairly high payload,” he says.

“There is not much burn damage aside from light metal like the vehicles, and much of the rubble is very large pieces of concrete which is different from the smaller fragments we would see from shrapnel damage caused by mortars or other light projectiles.

“Satellite footage shows damage limited to a particular quadrant of the building which suggests more accurate targeting than we would see from a bomb, so that is also consistent with the damage we would see from an air to surface missile.”

Mr Gannon says that the level of damage seen was “quite a bit higher” than could be achieved by the kind of rockets known to be used by Palestinian militant groups in Gaza.

“There is also very little shrapnel or fire damage from spent fuel that I can see, both of which would be present at the site of a smaller rocket or mortar attack,” he added.

Sky News has not seen reports of rockets being fired by any other groups in the area. The IDF later said it had, on that day, launched airstrikes “in the area of Deir al Balah”.

“During these strikes, terrorists from the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organisations were eliminated, and a number of terrorist infrastructure were destroyed,” the post on Telegram on 6 December said.

Sky News presented the findings of this investigation to the IDF. A spokesperson declined to say whether Israel was responsible for the blast at the Musabeh family home.

‘I can’t find any rationale’

Mr Sunghay, the senior UN official, told Sky News that even if only military targets had been struck, there would still be serious questions over the IDF’s decision to tell civilians they could move to Deir al Balah on the day of, and in the days following, the strikes.

“I can’t find any rationale, to be honest,” he said.

“At a minimum you wouldn’t again reiterate that it’s a safe place. If you call it a safe place and people have gone there and you’ve struck it once, at a minimum you would wait a little while. For me, it doesn’t make sense that they kept calling it a safe zone.”

‘Warnings are not enough’

Brian Finucane, an expert legal adviser with the non-profit International Crisis Group, says that there is a requirement on warring parties to provide effective advanced warnings to civilians, where feasible.

“This calls into question whether Israel is actually taking feasible precautions,” said Mr Finucane.

“If [Israel] issues warnings urging people to relocate to a certain area and then nonetheless conducts further strikes there, that’s not really an effective advanced warning.

“But even if this warning scheme worked as advertised… Warnings are not enough. Israel still has to distinguish between civilians and combatants.”

Even receiving those warnings has been difficult. Intermittent internet and telecommunications outages have made it much harder for civilians across Gaza to find and share information about safe areas.

On 17 December, connectivity was gradually restored after a three-day blackout, the longest outage on record since the start of the present conflict, according to cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks.

But not all Gazans have mobile devices, making access to the IDF instructions impossible for many. Many people are having to communicate and share information by word of mouth.

And even for those who do have access to phones, Israel’s official social media posts and evacuation orders have been confusing and contradictory.

Sky News analysis of the IDF’s 22 evacuation orders between 1 December and 19 December shows that only nine have included maps of the area to be evacuated. In all nine cases, these maps have directly contradicted the written orders provided.

In only six of the 22 orders did the IDF cite specific numbered zones. In all six cases, parts of the numbered zones were excluded from the static maps attached to the posts.

‘This chaos and confusion could have killed me’

The IDF’s interactive map was presented as a high-tech, humane solution to conducting urban warfare in one of the most densely populated parts of the planet.

Yet this map has never been updated to show areas being evacuated – Gazans have had to rely on static maps published via social media.

None of the evacuation orders have included any mapping of areas to which people can safely flee. Instead, these areas have simply been named.

In the four evacuation orders issued since 16 December, that too has stopped: Gazans have been told where to flee from, but not where they might flee to.

The only safe area which the IDF has mapped is a strip of coastline that Israel has called the al-Mawasi humanitarian zone. It has provided rough sketches of this zone, but has never marked it out clearly. The two maps it has produced are, when analysed in mapping software, contradictory.

Even when the orders are clear, as in the recent orders for civilians to leave the north and head towards Deir al Balah, it is often unclear how Gazans are supposed to safely make the journey.

Kamal Almashharawi, a lawyer from Gaza City who recently fled the territory, recently spoke to a friend in northern Gaza who told him it was too dangerous to even open the curtains due to fighting outside.

Mr Almashharawi was forced to flee the north himself after Israel first ordered its evacuation on 13 October.

“This chaos and confusion could have killed me,” says Mr Almashharawi, who is now in Saudi Arabia.

“I was in Khan Younis at first, and I thought that the ground invasion would start there so I had to go back to Gaza City. We hadn’t heard of any bombing there, we didn’t realise it’s because the internet was cut.”

Mr Almashharawi says that he subsequently arranged an evacuation from Gaza City for himself and around 30 family members.

“On the ‘safe passage’ I saw dead bodies on the ground. Those people read the instructions and followed the instructions, and now they’re dead.”

Mr Sunghay said the UN was planning to publish a report on incidents in areas where the IDF had told civilians to flee to, including Deir al Balah.

“If we are unable to prevent attacks and killings of civilians, what will come next is accountability and for that purpose this work is extremely important,” he said.

A spokesperson for the IDF said: “Since the beginning of the fighting, the IDF has been imploring the civilian population to temporarily evacuate from areas of intense fighting, to safer areas, in order to minimise the risk posed by remaining in areas of intense hostilities.

“The IDF carries out this effort in a variety of ways, including radio broadcasts, a dedicated website in Arabic, millions of pre-recorded phone calls and tens of thousands of live phone calls, and millions of leaflets.

“While the IDF makes these efforts to evacuate the population out of the line of fire, Hamas systematically attempts to prevent the evacuation of civilians by calling on the civilians to ignore the IDF’s requests. In doing so, Hamas endangers the civilian population of Gaza.”

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

World

Trump vowed to end Ukraine war in first 24 hours of his presidency – nearly 200 days in, could he be close?

Published

8 hours ago

August 8, 2025

admin

Trump vowed to end Ukraine war in first 24 hours of his presidency - nearly 200 days in, could he be close?

Seven hours is a long time in US politics.

At 10am, Donald Trump accused Russia of posing a threat to America’s national security.

By 5pm, Mr Trump said there was a “good prospect” of him meeting Vladimir Putin “soon”.

There had, he claimed, been “great progress” in talks between his special envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russian president.

It’s difficult to gauge the chances of a meeting between the two leaders without knowing what “great progress” means.

Is Russia “inclined” towards agreeing a ceasefire, as Ukraine’s president now claims?

Is Mr Putin prepared to meet with his Ukrainian foe, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, too?

The very fact that we’re asking those questions suggests something shifted on a day when there was no expectation of a breakthrough.

Mr Trump repeatedly vowed to end the war within 24 hours of becoming president.

On day 198 of his presidency, he might, just might, be one step closer to achieving that.

World

My experience interviewing Nicholas Rossi – the fugitive in Scotland now facing a rape trial in Utah

Published

8 hours ago

August 8, 2025

admin

My experience interviewing Nicholas Rossi - the fugitive in Scotland now facing a rape trial in Utah

There was always a heavy hint of charade in the company of “Arthur Knight”.

It was hard to square the man presenting as a bumbling aristocrat in Glasgow’s west end with one of America’s most wanted. And yet, there were always clues.

Like his knowledge of Kay Burley. On the day I first arranged to interview him, he told me that TV was a mystery to him and that he never watched it.

Then he said he hoped he wouldn’t be nailed to the wall by Kay – our then Sky News colleague and presenter.

How did he know Kay if he knew nothing about television, I wondered.

He also asked how we would “chyron” him, an American term for an on-screen title that I was unfamiliar with (and I’m in the business).

There was also the matter of the plasma TV screen on his front room wall – he knew TV, alright.

Such was the international interest in the story of “Arthur Knight” – real name Nicholas Rossi – there was no escaping the attention of TV and everyone else.

His was a tale lifted from the pages of a fictional thriller – a fugitive pursued halfway across the world and discovered only when he had the misfortune to catch COVID and leave his tattoos exposed on a hospital ward.

Medical staff at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital did the eyes-on execution of an international manhunt.

As careful as he was, Rossi left a digital footprint that US authorities followed to a flat in Glasgow.

When we first arrived, he had been arrested but was out on bail.

It was dark inside his flat, and there wasn’t much floor space.

It made movement difficult for Rossi because he was in a wheelchair.

When physical movement demanded finesse, like in lifting him into a car, his wife Miranda manoeuvred him Sumo-wrestler style.

Quite the spectacle.

We sat down for a number of interviews with Rossi and his wife, Miranda. Always, he addressed my questions with the busy eyes of concentrated deceit.

Once, he insisted on sitting with his back to a bookcase. It featured the tome Machiavelli, prominently in shot.

It made me wonder how much of him was enjoying this.

He was a performer, certainly, and I suppose he’d been thrust centre stage.

He claimed to be an Irish orphan, but he never did get the accent right.

It was like a comedy fake when he wrapped an Irish lilt around gravelly tones.

He would suddenly start to sound Irish when you reminded him that he was, eh, Irish.

Not that he had the paperwork to prove it.

There was no birth certificate, no ID for his parents, no idea of exactly where in Ireland he’d been born.

He was the boy from nowhere because he knew he had to be – give any journalist a place to go looking for confirmation and therein lies a trail to ruin.

So “Arthur” kept it vague – his freedom depended on it.

When he did commit to detail, he ran into difficulty.

He told me he’d been raised in homes run by the Christian Brothers in Ireland, and I asked him which ones, specifically.

His reply was: “St. Mary’s and Sacred Heart.”

A quick check with the Christian Brothers revealed they have no facility named Sacred Heart in Ireland, and anything called St Mary’s wasn’t residential.

Of course, it was never going to last for him.

The extradition court in Edinburgh had fingerprint and photographic evidence, and there was a tattoo match, too.

Next week sees the start of his latest trial.

He is accused of raping a woman to whom he had been engaged.

The allegations offer a duplication for Rossi’s crime modus operandi – isolating women, refusing to leave their company, and engaging in sexual assault.

“Evil,” is how he was described by Brian Coogan to me. Brian is a former state representative in Rhode Island who, at one stage, was on the verge of adopting the young Rossi.

He was warned off by the adoption judge, who refused to let it happen, having seen the file on the young man.

Violence in childhood duly extended into adulthood, and Rossi was convicted in 2008 after sexually assaulting Mary Grebinski on a college campus in Ohio.

A DNA sample from that attack is what linked Rossi to rape in Utah, and it’s what caused the long arm of the law to reach as far as Scotland.

The footnote to the story concerns Miranda, Rossi’s wife, whom he married in Bristol in 2020.

Rossi faked his death in 2020, and his “widow”, a woman by the name of Louise, ran around telling people he’d passed away.

Father Bernard Healey, of Our Lady of Mercy Parish Church in Rhode Island, took a call from an English woman – sounding like “Hyacinth Bouquet”.

She said Rossi had died and asked if he would hold a memorial mass.

The priest agreed, but when the invitations started going out on social media, he took a call from the police telling him to cancel the arrangements, as Rossi wasn’t dead – he’d faked it and was in hiding.

The voice that rang round reporting news of Nicholas’ demise was familiar to anyone who has heard his wife Miranda. The two voices sound identical, indeed.

How much was Miranda involved in the deceit? It remains an open question in a story about to enter a new chapter – this time, set in an Utah courtroom.

World

Death cap mushroom trial: How murder plot unfolded – and how killer tried to cover her tracks

Published

8 hours ago

August 8, 2025

admin

Death cap mushroom trial: How murder plot unfolded - and how killer tried to cover her tracks

More details from the trial of an Australian woman convicted of murdering her parents-in-law and an aunt after serving them poisonous mushrooms for lunch have been revealed – including why her husband rejected an invitation.

Mother-of-two Erin Patterson, 50, was convicted of the 2023 murders of her parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Gail Patterson’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66, along with the attempted murder of Reverend Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband.

She served guests beef wellington knowing it contained deadly death cap mushrooms, also known as Amanita phalloides.

After a nine-week trial in Morwell, Victoria, the jury concluded unanimously that she poisoned the guests on purpose and rejected her defence that the deaths were a “terrible accident”.

Aspects of the case, which concluded last month, were the subject of a gag order, as the judge didn’t want them to influence the jury.

But those details have now been made public.

Here’s what you need to know about the trial and the new information.

Patterson’s husband rejected the invite ‘out of fear’

Patterson invited the four victims for lunch at her home in Leongatha, a small town in Melbourne, on 29 July 2023.

Her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, with whom she shares two children, was also invited but didn’t attend.

In court, the jury was not told why Mr Patterson rejected the invite, but it has now been revealed that he told a pre-trial hearing that he did so “out of fear”.

“I thought there’d be a risk that she’d poison me if I attended,” he told the court months before the trial.

He said he believed Patterson, from whom he had been estranged since 2015, had tried to poison him with her cooking three times in the past, and had therefore stopped eating food she prepared.

He said the previous alleged poisonings had occurred on family camping trips after he had eaten dishes including penne bolognese pasta, chicken korma curry and a vegetable curry wrap.

Mr Patterson claimed he became seriously ill after the meals, but no poisonings were ever found.

He said he didn’t believe anyone else would be at risk from her cooking.

On Friday the court ruled in favour of lawyers representing media who sought to overturn the gag order on this information, meaning it could be shared for the first time.

Patterson told guests she was prepping ‘special meal’

During the trial, text messages read out revealed Patterson found her husband’s decision not to come “really disappointing” as she had spent time and money preparing the “special meal”.

Mr Patterson told the court he had listed them as financially separated on a tax return, which triggered a series of child support payments that meant he would no longer pay their two children’s private school fees directly.

Speaking through tears, Mr Patterson said: “I was sure she was very upset about that.”

Reverend Wilkinson said he and his wife were surprised by the invitation, telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “There was no reason given for the lunch, and I remember talking to Heather wondering why the sudden invitation.”

But he said the pair were “very happy to be invited”.

Patterson’s daughter, according to ABC, told the court that her mother organised a trip to the cinema for her and her brother in advance of the lunch.

Sole survivor gives details about the lunch

Reverend Wilkinson told the court that Heather and Gail offered to help plate up the food, but Patterson rejected the offer.

Each plate had a serving of mashed potatoes, green beans and an individual beef wellington.

Patterson said the mushrooms were a mixture of button mushrooms from a supermarket and dried mushrooms bought at an Asian grocery store several months before, which were in a hand-labelled packet.

Reverend Wilkinson said the four guests were given large grey dinner plates, while Patterson ate from a smaller, tan-coloured plate.

He said he remembered his wife pointing this out after they became ill.

The reverend said he and his wife ate their full servings, while Don ate his own and half of his wife’s.

Reverend Wilkinson said that after the meal, Patterson told them she had been diagnosed with cancer, suggesting the lunch was put together so that she could ask them the best way to tell her children about the illness.

The prosecution said she did this to justify the children’s absence.

The defence does not dispute that Patterson lied about having cancer.

When asked why she lied about her health, Patterson told the court it was partly to elicit sympathy from her husband’s relatives, as she felt they were growing apart.

“I didn’t want their care of me to stop, so I kept it going. I shouldn’t have done it,” she said, adding: “I did lie to them.”

Defendant wanted to serve ‘something special’

While on the stand at the beginning of June, Patterson said she might have accidentally included foraged mushrooms in the fatal lunch.

She said she brought expensive ingredients and researched ideas to find “something special” to serve. She said she deviated from her chosen recipe to improve the “bland” flavour.

However, she denied that a series of photos showing mushrooms placed on weighing scales in her kitchen was evidence she had been measuring a “fatal dose” to serve to her lunch guests.

Prosecutor Nanette Rogers asked: “I suggest that you were weighing these death cap mushrooms so that you could calculate the weight required for the administration of a fatal dose for one person. Agree or disagree?”

“Disagree,” Patterson replied.

The mother of two said she began foraging for mushrooms around the towns of Korumburra and Leongatha during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 and would use a food dehydrator to dry and preserve them.

Prosecutors earlier claimed the defendant denied ever owning a food dehydrator, but police traced one owned by her to a nearby dump. It was later found to contain death cap mushrooms.

What makes death cap mushrooms so lethal?

The death cap is one of the most toxic mushrooms on the planet and is involved in the majority of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide.

The species contains three main groups of toxins: amatoxins, phallotoxins, and virotoxins.

From these, amatoxins are primarily responsible for the toxic effects in humans.

The alpha-amanitin amatoxin has been found to cause protein deficit and ultimately cell death, although other mechanisms are thought to be involved.

The liver is the main organ that fails due to the poison, but other organs are also affected, most notably the kidneys.

The effects usually begin after a short latent period and include gastrointestinal disorders followed by jaundice, seizures, coma, and, eventually, death.

Two mobile phones she owned were also reset to factory status three times.

Patterson told the court she disposed of the dehydrator before a visit from child protection, who were investigating her living arrangements. She said the phones were wiped because she panicked during the police investigation.

“I was scared of the conversation that might flow about the meal and the dehydrator,” she said.

“I was scared they would blame me for it, for making everyone sick. I was scared that they would remove the children.”

Patterson talks through tears

Lawyer Mr Mandy also questioned Patterson about a series of expletive-laden messages she sent to friends about the Patterson family.

“I wish I’d never said it. I feel ashamed for saying it and I wish that the family didn’t have to hear that I said that,” Patterson told the court about the messages.

Talking through tears, she added: “I was really frustrated with Simon, but it wasn’t Don and Gail’s fault.”

The court previously heard that the relationship between Patterson and her estranged husband deteriorated shortly before the murders due to a disagreement over child support.

Patterson’s children ‘ate leftovers after guests went to hospital’

All four victims fell ill and were experiencing severe vomiting and diarrhoea by midnight on the day of the lunch.

Police previously said the symptoms of all four of those who became ill were consistent with poisoning from death cap mushrooms, which are responsible for 90% of all toxic mushroom-related fatalities.

Patterson said she also became unwell hours after eating the meal, but claimed she wasn’t as ill as her guests because she had vomited due to an eating disorder.

Her daughter, according to the ABC, told the court she remembers Patterson telling her she had diarrhoea that night.

Patterson claimed she and her children ate leftovers from the beef wellington on the same day. Her daughter told the court she remembered this, and that her mum didn’t eat much because she was still feeling unwell.

The mum said she scraped the mushrooms off the plates in advance because she knew her children didn’t like them.

Patterson went to hospital two days after the lunch, where she initially discharged herself against medical advice, the court was told.

A nurse at the hospital where she was treated told the court she “didn’t look unwell like Ian and Heather”, who were at the same hospital.

Gail and Heather died on Friday 4 August 2023, while Don died a day later.

Reverend Wilkinson spent seven weeks in hospital but survived.

Days after the deaths, police opened a homicide investigation and confirmed Patterson was a suspect. She was charged on 2 November 2023 and convicted in July 2025.

What happens now?

Patterson is facing a potential life sentence for each of the murders and 25 years for attempted murder.

A two-day sentencing hearing is set for 25 August, and once passed, Patterson will have 28 days to lodge an appeal against the sentence, the convictions, or both.

Her lawyers have said she will be appealing against the convictions, and argued against the gag-ordered information being released in case it influenced potential jurors in the event of a retrial.