This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

“It’s very difficult for me to talk about Aiia. It’s not easy.”

Saeed Maasarwe, the 61-year-old father of the young woman raped and murdered in Melbourne in January, struggled through media interviews on Sunday as he paid tribute to his daughter and launched a medical fellowship in her name.

Saeed and daughter Noor, 23, are in Melbourne to witness the sentencing of Aiia’s murderer, Codey Herrmann, on Tuesday. Aiia, a 21-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel, was a student at La Trobe University. She was beaten, raped and murdered minutes after she got off a tram in Bundoora in Melbourne’s north to walk the rest of the way home. Herrmann pleaded guilty to the crime.

Saeed had no view of how long Herrmann, 21, should spend in jail. “Our compass is not revenge,” he said. “We think all the time, our mind, our compass is positive, is not negative.” The Crown has sought a life sentence for Herrmann.

‘So bleak as to defy description’: confronting the life of Aiia Maasarwe's killer Read more

Saeed Maasarwe urged authorities to do more to prevent crimes rather than respond to them after they happened. He and Noor, a business student in Shanghai, said they were grateful for the outpouring of support from Australians after Aiia’s death.

But they were disappointed in the court process, particularly the lifting of suppression orders that allowed more details of the crime to be published.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A vigil is held at La Trobe University in January in memory of Aiia Maasarwe. Photograph: Ellen Smith/AAP

“In the court, we want something not to be public and we asked for this one and the court they don’t care about our feeling or our culture ... [it] didn’t care for us,” he said.

“It was very hard to see [the details of the murder] in the news,” said Noor. “We already know what happened. It was hard enough and it’s not someone I knew. It’s my sister and she’s also my best friend ... it was very, very hard.”

Supreme court judge Elizabeth Hollingworth lifted the suppression of some of the details of the murder earlier this month, citing a transparent justice process and the need to explain the reasons for her eventual sentence.

Noor said it was difficult to come back to Australia, a country she had always considered safe, a “heaven on earth”. Now, she feels unsafe to walk down the street alone.

“I don’t know if I will come back here, especially here in Melbourne. It’s a mixed feeling. I had goosebumps when we landed because she landed here, this is the last land where she lived.”

Saeed said he needed to bear witness to the sentence of his daughter’s murderer. “This is a small thing, but we can care about Aiia, to see Aiia not just a number, a folder in the court. This was a human.”

The family helped launch the Aiia Maasarwe Memorial Medical Fellowship program for Project Rozana, an international organisation that seeks through health programs to build better understanding between Palestinians and Israelis.

The inaugural fellowship was awarded to Dr Khadra Hasan Ali Salami, a paediatrician at the Augusta Victoria hospital in East Jerusalem, which treats Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. Salami will undertake two years of intensive training in paediatric bone marrow transplantation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aiia Maasarwe Memorial Medical Fellowship recipient Dr Khadra Hasan Ali Salami (left) and Saeed Maasarwe. Photograph: Ellen Smith/AAP

Project Rozana founder Ron Finkel said the hope of the fellowship was that “out of something tragic, something positive can come”.

Aiia’s family hopes the same. It is less than a year since Aiia’s murder, and their feelings remain raw. Asked what she remembered most about her sister, Noor said: “Her energy. She was full of life.”

Her father said: “All the time she smiled. I remember all the time she thinks positive. And she was very, very sensitive.

“I try to go back to my life, a normal life, but it’s not easy, because every place I go, every young girl I see, I remember Aiia.”