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A Palestinian woman detained for over a week following the cancellation of her visa has been released overnight.
Maha Almassri was taken from her home in Punchbowl in Sydney’s south-west at 5am last Thursday, and initially held at Bankstown police station before being transferred to Villawood detention centre, according to her family.
Her Australian visa was cancelled by Assistant Citizenship Minister Julian Hill after failing the character test, according to a document seen by SBS News.
A private Facebook post confirmed her release on Thursday night, which SBS News has verified with a source close to the family.
Details of the release are unknown, and the status of her visa is unclear.
Australia’s Migration Act grants its home affairs minister — or a chosen delegate — the right to cancel a person’s visa on character grounds or if the cancellation is deemed to be “in the national interest”.
The document stated that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation assessed Almassri to be “directly or indirectly a risk to security”, therefore deeming she “objectively fails the character test”.
Alison Battisson, a lawyer acting for Almassri, declined to comment.
When contacted by SBS News, a spokesperson for Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said: “The government will not be commenting on this cancellation.”
“Any information in the public domain is being supplied by the individual or her family and is not necessarily consistent with the information held by our intelligence and security agencies.”
Opposition Home Affairs spokesperson Andrew Hastie described the government’s handling of the process as “shambolic from start to finish”.
“How is it that this individual posed such a security risk the minister cancelled their visa, and yet a week later they are free in the Australian community? Australians deserve answers,” he said in a statement.
“This is the same Labor government that issued thousands of tourist visas to people from Gaza — a warzone controlled by a terrorist group — before the proper security checks were undertaken, and with no plan for what to do once they arrived in Australia.
“It is little wonder Australians have lost confidence in Labor’s ability to manage immigration and national security.”
