A seven-year-old girl told a court she saw her father with a knife in his hands and blood on his shirt the night he allegedly stabbed her mother to death in the family's Gordon home.
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Maged Mohommed Ahmed Al-Harazi, 36, banged on the door of Tuggeranong police station to report his wife Sabah Al-Mdwali had been killed in the early hours of March 17, 2015.
Police found Ms Al-Mdwali's body with 57 stab wounds in an upstairs bedroom. It's alleged Mr Al-Harazi attacked her during an argument as she breastfed their 10-month-old son, while their two older children slept nearby.
Mr Al-Harazi, 36, alleges his wife's father and teenage brother arrived at the house late the previous night and told him to take the children to the shops. He said when he arrived home, the men had gone and his wife was dead.
The father and son were arrested but later released without charge. Mr Al-Harazi was charged with murder and pleaded not guilty.
The couple's daughter gave evidence during her father's ACT Supreme Court trial via audiovisual link on Friday, when she said she went into her older brother's room before she woke up feeling scared that night.
"I waked up and then I went to my mumma's room," she said. "I saw my dad holding a knife."
The girl, who was five when her mother was killed, told defence barrister Ken Archer her father had been wearing a white shirt.
"Yes, and then when he came to our room there was blood in his shirt," she said.
When Mr Archer asked where on her father's shirt the blood was, the girl stood up and pointed to indicate it was around his middle.
The court also heard a sound recording of Mr Al-Harazi's first police interview, soon after he arrived at the station, during which he sobbed and grew distressed as he asked whether officers were sure his wife had died.
"You can't help her?," he asked, to which the police officer said: "No, she's passed away."
Mr Al-Harazi said: "There's no way she'll come back?" The police officer replied, "no".
The accused spoke of his wife's father and brother showing up at the house that night and said, through an Arabic interpreter, he was aware Ms Al-Mdwali was having problems with her family but had asked him to keep out of it.
He'd overheard a conversation between his wife and her mother, or a sister, a few days earlier when they had raised money problems and spoke of her father and brother demanding Ms Al-Mdwali give them $8000.
Mr Al-Harazi said several rooms in the couple's Knoke Avenue house had been messy and appeared to have been ransacked when he'd returned home.
"We leave for 25 minutes and come back and this crime's been committed, so who apart from them would have done it?," he said.
"I would never do something like that."
Mr Al-Harazi was then heard to break down in tears as he said the two men "should have thought about her husband and kids" and his children would now grow up without a mother.
"We need her," he said.
Mr Al-Harazi said he had been in Australia for 10 months and was adamant his wife be buried in their native Yemen.
"I don't want to live here anymore, I want to go back to Yemen with my children. I don't want to live here anymore where her family is.
"I never thought I would be facing this situation for my wife to be dead. We've been married for 12 years."
The trial continues.
