Children filmed playing on scooters while their mother allegedly lay dead inside

A man accused of killing his former partner in Victoria’s north paraded two young children outside the house in social media videos while their mother lay dead inside the home.

In three videos posted to Facebook on Tuesday morning, Dandenong man Prem Kumar, 45, encouraged the boys to praise nations including Australia, India and Saudi Arabia, and Hindu and Islamic deities. He also declared he and the children were safe.

Police were called to the social housing unit in the border town of Cobram about 5am on Tuesday, and found the children’s 32-year-old mother dead inside.

Kumar was arrested later on Tuesday and fronted Shepparton Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday, charged with her murder.

The children and their mother had been living in Cobram for about two years​. Kumar ​i​s linked to an address in Dandenong, in Melbourne’s south-east.

In one video posted to Facebook just after 8am on Tuesday, Kumar tells the pyjama-clad children to repeat after him and say they are safe.

“Hi everyone, I am safe,” Kumar, wearing a saffron-coloured headscarf, says in the video. He instructs the older child to repeat after him.

“Say ‘I am safe, Brahma, Allah, Vishnu, Shiva, all messengers prophets save me’,” Kumar says. The eldest child repeats the words and the younger child sits in his lap.

“Bye, see you in Dandenong,” Kumar says at the end of the two-minute video. “Say ‘see you in Dandenong’.”

In another video filmed by Kumar in darkness, the children played on scooters outside the unit.

“What’s my name?” he asked the older child four times. “Kumar,” the child replied.

”Good, good, good,” said Kumar.

In the third Facebook video, emergency services can be heard in the background as Kumar films the children, now changed from their pyjamas into traditional Indian clothing, outside the unit. “Do you want to come sit in the car?” an emergency worker can be heard saying off camera.

But Kumar tells the children to recite after him. “Say ‘glory be to Brahma, glory be to almighty Allah, glory be to paradise, heaven, Australia’,” Kumar says in the video.

“You are the king of Saudi Arabia. Be like a king.”

On Tuesday morning, the homicide squad’s Detective Inspector Dean Thomas said Kumar was known to the allegedly murdered woman and added that “people should be safe in their relationships”.

“One woman killed in a situation like this is too many, and we can’t stand for it,” Thomas said.

One Cobram local said she saw a man matching Kumar’s description and wearing the same clothes from the Facebook videos doing push-ups on the footpath outside the unit on Tuesday morning.

“He was ... removed from the premises and walked into the police station,” she said. “It was all quite strange.”

On Tuesday, Moira Shire council administrator Susan Benedyka said: “Days like today remind us that we still have a long way to go in addressing gender-based violence, both nationally and closer to home.”

Kumar is due to appear in a Shepparton court on December 10 for a committal mention. No application for bail was made.

With Erin Pearson

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