Guilty: Auburn Sheikh Shabbir Mohammedbhai Vaziri. Credit:Emma Partridge On Thursday, a jury found the girls' mother, who can only be known as A2, and a former midwife, guilty of mutilating the clitorises of the sisters during ceremonies in Wollongong and Sydney between October 2009 and August 2012. A sheikh, Shabbir Mohammedbhai Vaziri, was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact. All three were members of the Dawoodi Bohra Shia Muslim community The sisters, who were given pseudonyms by the court to protect their identities, were interviewed by a social worker at their school in August 2012, after police received reports of female genital mutilation within the religious sect.

C1 said that when she was about seven she went with her mother to a house in Wollongong, where the midwife laid her on a bed and carried out a procedure known as "khatna", which involved a "little cut down there". When the social worker asked her why it happened, C1 replied: "It's a part of our culture and it has happened to every girl." C2, the younger sister, told police similar details, saying she was hurt on "the bottom". C1, who is now 11, later gave evidence that she saw the midwife holding a tool that looked like scissors. The defence argued the ceremony was "secret women's business", involving a symbolic touching of the girls' genitals with forceps, and there was no physical evidence of injury.

The midwife's barrister Stuart Bouveng asked C1 what kind of pain she experienced during the procedure. "It was short, it didn't last long. It was like a pinching or a cutting, I'm not sure," C1 said. The jury heard hours of telephone intercepts, including a call A2 made to an aunt in which she said: "Honourable maternal aunt, we had [C1], [C2] circumcised hadn't we?" There were also several calls in which the girls' parents spoke about whether they could tell police it happened in India or Africa. Dr Sonia Grover, a paediatric gynaecologist, told the court it was possible the tips of the girls' clitorises had been removed, but there were other more likely medical explanations.

"If you were going to remove tissue, it would hurt and bleed," she said. "The information I was given was that the girls did not complain of pain or problems in the days after. So it means whatever was done was a minor procedure." After the verdict, Crown Prosecutor Nanette Williams asked that bail be revoked for all three offenders, arguing that there was a risk they would flee the jurisdiction and that they now faced jail. The police officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Sergeant Eugene Stek, told the court he was concerned that the offenders would be protected by their close-knit community and possibly assisted to leave the country now that they had been convicted. Sergeant Stek said that, on the day Vaziri was arrested, he had been about to leave the country for India. He also said he was worried that some or all of the offenders would encourage fellow members of their community to hide other instances of female genital mutilation if allowed back into the community.

But Justice Johnson refused the detention application, allowing the trio to remain on bail subject to strict conditions, including the surrendering of their passports and other travel documents. They will return to court on February 5 for sentencing. with Paul Bibby