What happened to Safa Annour?

Safa waved enthusiastically to the driver as she walked past, and again before she was helped onto the footpath on Stuart Street in Griffith, ACT. Another child had rushed off the bus and onto the footpath, appearing impatient as they waited for Safa and the woman to catch up. It was 8.40am on April 30, 2018.

Safa was wearing a dark-green overcoat that morning, which covered most of her small torso. Her hair was bunched in yellow ties, the same type she was wearing in the only picture police released of her.

She was dead that afternoon, unable to be resuscitated after being taken to Canberra Hospital at about 1.50pm. An autopsy would conclude she had died of internal bleeding from blunt force trauma.

Police believed she was murdered, 19 days short of her third birthday.

What happened to Safa Annour?

Almost nothing is known about her life, let alone what transpired in the hours after she stepped off the bus that morning.

The police, who waited six months to tell the public about her death, had made no arrests or named suspects. There had been no coronial inquest, nor public pressure for one. No relatives came forward with public tributes or demands for answers, nor did members of Canberra's small Sudanese community, to which Safa briefly belonged.

There were no candlelight vigils, no #Justice4Safa hashtags on social media or GoFundMe pages - the symbols of mourning in the modern age.

The police and ACT government blanketed the case with a thick veil of secrecy, refusing to answer the media's most basic questions or confirm the most basic facts, including that the woman on the bus was Safa's mother and the other child her older brother.

What was left was silence.

I was working the breaking news shift for The Canberra Times when ACT Policing called a press conference at its Belconnen headquarters on the morning of November 1, 2018.

The police beat is often dull in Canberra. The sorts of major crimes that keep journalists busy in places like Sydney and Melbourne - murders, gang violence, drug busts - are rare in the nation's capital.

The reporters and camera crew crammed inside Winchester police station's media room that morning were unaware of exactly what was to be announced when Detective Superintendent Scott Moller approached the lectern.

Moller would reveal, for the first time publicly, a two-year-old named Safa Annour had died on April 30 in what police suspected was a murder.

Strongly built, bald and with piercing ice-blue eyes, the veteran detective spoke in slow, deliberate sentences, his tone unchanged by the subject he described. Safa's death, he said plainly, was ''absolutely horrendous''.

Police circulated the CCTV footage retrieved from the bus, which captured Safa waving to the driver on the morning of the day she died. They also published a photograph of the toddler sitting alone on a stone step. Her yellow top matched the ties in her hair.

Police had established two people were responsible for Safa's care at the time she suffered the fatal injuries, but refused to name them, disclose what relationship they had to her or confirm if they were persons of interest or suspects in the case.

They wouldn't confirm the identities of the woman and other child on the bus, whose faces were blurred in the CCTV footage.

Moller said police had been ''vigorously'' investigating numerous lines of inquiry but wouldn't say what they were.

As for the six-month delay in informing the public of Safa's suspected murder, Moller offered only this: "At the time of her death, we made a decision not to release those details to the public. Since that time, the investigation has taken us along a line of inquiry and we have decided to release these details."

The toddler's death received extensive media coverage that day, prompting an outpouring of grief on social media. But after police refused requests for further detail and no family members, friends, community leaders or neighbours came forward to shed light on her short life or tragic death, there was no immediate follow-up.

There would be another burst of coverage a fortnight later when police released a second clip of CCTV footage, this time from the day before Safa's death, in another appeal for the public's help.

Around 9.40am on Sunday, April 29, a home security camera caught Safa, her brother and a woman walking south on Sturt Avenue, Narrabundah - the suburb immediately east of Griffith. Police wanted to speak with the woman, who was white and dressed in office attire, but stressed she wasn't a suspect. After that, just three stories were published about the unsolved murder over the next eight months. The final one, published in June 2019, was the most revealing. Two former colleagues at The Canberra Times, who had spent months investigating the case, reported Safa, her mother and brother had been receiving 'crisis support' and living away from home at the time of the toddler's death. The police refused to confirm or deny any of it. The reason for the secrecy was never explained.

I refused to accept, even with the persisting silence, there wasn't someone who knew and cared about Safa, who cherished her life and was grieving her death. I felt sure those people existed after visiting Portion 11 - the Islamic section - of Gungahlin Cemetery in Canberra's northern suburbs.

One of the colleagues who pursued the case visited the cemetery roughly a year after Safa died. Back then her grave was marked only with a generic ACT Cemeteries Authority tag, which had spelt her name 'Safia'. Three-and-a-half years on, I found a purple plaque with three lines of text written in Arabic. The text was verses from the Koran about the soul returning to God after death, which is commonly used on plaques for Muslim graves.

I returned to the car to scribble a note in the diary I was keeping during the investigation.

Someone cared for Safa.

Safa was said to be a smiling, bubbly child. The enthusiastic waves to the bus driver on the morning of April 30, 2018 - that was Safa.

I found another photo of her, this time with her brother, sitting on the edge of a fountain. She had bright-pink ties in her hair, matching the colour of her shirt and boots. The same row of silver bangles hung loosely around the left wrist. She wasn't staring straight at the camera. This time her head was turned, eyes glancing back, the first hint of a cheeky grin emerging at the corner of her mouth.

In the months after arriving in Canberra, her parents' relationship is understood to have frayed. Her father Abubakr relocated interstate and Safa, her mother and brother moved into a home for women. That was where the toddler was living in the days before she died.

Among the few details police revealed at that first press conference was that two unnamed people were responsible for Safa's care when she suffered her fatal injuries.

Her mother, Huda, I was able to establish, was one of them.

The other person was a Sudanese man Huda had befriended in Canberra named Luay Shaor. Both were present at the hospital on the night Safa died, along with other members of the Sudanese community and police.

At that early stage the toddler's death wasn't being treated as a possible murder. But when the results of the post-mortem came in, police ramped up their investigation.

Huda's daughter had not yet been buried when child protection stepped in and took her son.

The intervention was detailed in an email the mother sent months later to the ACT Human Rights Commission in a desperate plea for its help so she could see her son face-to-face. Huda told the commission the Child and Youth Protection Service (CYPS) had removed her son four days after Safa's death because it was being treated as ''suspicious". She felt authorities had made up their minds she was involved. She wrote CYPS had banned her from supervised visits to her son, restricting their interactions to video calls.

She was a grieving mother, practically alone in a foreign country, battling a system she didn't understand. She wanted to see her son and for him to see her, so he would know his mother hadn't abandoned him.

For legal reasons, the ACT government would not confirm if it launched the emergency intervention. It would not confirm whether or not Safa was known to authorities before she died.

The minister responsible for the ACT's child protection system, Rachel Stephen-Smith, confirmed she was briefed on the case because of the ''unusual circumstances'' of the toddler's death. Stephen-Smith was given a summary of what was known about Safa's life up to then, a brief statement her office provided to me said.

I tried to contact Huda.

She didn't respond.

Luay Shaor came to Australia with his brother in 2001 with the help of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The siblings were initially based in Tasmania before Luay left for Sydney, where he started a construction business.

The facts were detailed in court documents for a civil case that Luay's brother and his partner had launched against Canberra Hospital.

Luay was holding down a full-time job and had a family when, in 2013, he was sentenced to three months' weekend detention for bashing a man in his 60s. Court documents show Luay reacted to the older man hurling abuse and throwing stones by beating him, leaving him with fractures to both eye sockets, nasal bone and left ring finger.

The court heard Luay suffered from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, which developed after an ''extraordinarily difficult upbringing'' in Sudan.

The magistrate accepted there was a connection between his condition and the bashing, but found it didn't in and of itself explain it.

Luay had no criminal record and was praised for his work in the Sudanese community, The Canberra Times' report from his sentencing hearing showed.

His Facebook page painted an image of a doting single father whose life purpose was his daughter.

I tried to contact Luay.

He didn't respond.

I couldn't establish when Luay befriended Huda or the exact nature of their relationship. But multiple sources with knowledge of the case confirmed he spent time with the children, including on the day Safa died.

Huda took a driving lesson that day, during which time she was away from the children.

She remained in Canberra as she dealt with the fallout of her daughter's death and son's removal.

Luay didn't.

It is believed he left Australia and returned to Sudan in the months after April 30, 2018.

I never spoke to Scott Moller again.

It was not for a lack of trying. For weeks I pestered the police media team to arrange a meeting - even off-the-record - so I could put to them the long list of questions I now had.

Eventually, I was told he would be unavailable.

The police eventually arranged a briefing with another senior officer, Detective Sergeant Matt Innes, for midday on March 9, 2023.

This briefing was also off-the-record. But we had agreed the police would provide a written statement that could be used in this piece.

The basic facts about Safa's life, including who was responsible for her care when she sustained the fatal injuries, were not disputed. But police would not confirm, or deny, anything of substance about the investigation. They would not disclose who had been interviewed, arguing that doing so could jeopardise the investigation.

I had learned one of the reasons the case had been hidden from the public for six months was that it was treated as a domestic incident.

Innes wouldn't confirm that, either, saying only the police's ''investigative strategy determined no immediate public messaging was required".

I hoped there might be some answers in the internal police records produced during the six-month period, which I applied to access using freedom of information laws. A tranche of 120 such documents existed, including case notes and emails, but the police's lawyers refused to let me see them, arguing their release could reveal lines of inquiry and prejudice the investigation.

There were some things Innes would confirm. One of them deepened the mystery.

Safa's demeanour on the bus on the morning of April 30, 2018 led to the assumption she suffered her fatal injuries in the five-hour period before she was taken to hospital. But Innes revealed police had not ruled out the possibility that rather than one fatal blow, Safa died from an accumulation of blunt force traumas inflicted on her in the days prior.

Detectives assigned to Safa's case had trouble encouraging members of the Sudanese community to come forward and extracting information from them.

''Most newly arrived Sudanese don't feel they can have a voice, or that anyone would support them if they raise their voice,'' one Sudanese Australian migrant told me. ''People choose to be silent.''

Without naming individuals, Innes confirmed people with information about Safa's death had chosen to remain silent. But as the five-year anniversary approached, he insisted police remained committed to the case. "The death of any child is a tragedy - more so when it is believed to be the result of another person's actions," he said.

What happened to Safa Annour?

I can't answer that question.

Perhaps the coroner is now the only person who can.

I can, however, try to explain the silence.

It started with ACT Policing and its disposition for secrecy, a mentality shared by the territory government.

It was sustained because, aside from those two reporters in the first eight months, the local media chose not to dedicate its ever-thinning resources to the case.

The media's interest in tragedies like these so often relies on the families who speak up, who pose for photos with framed images of their loved ones. As the years passed and nobody from Safa's marginalised migrant community spoke up to demand justice, neither did we.

Perhaps that is why this case haunted me.

I was complicit.

We cannot know what might have come from persistent pressure that was never applied, or outrage that never erupted. We cannot know the cost of our silence.

But imagine for a moment if her name was Sarah, not Safa.

Imagine her hair was blonde, not brown, and her skin was white, not black.

Don't tell me it wouldn't have been different.