By Paddy Clancy

Two sisters, dubbed the Scissor Sisters have been jailed for killing their mother’s violent lover on her instructions, and then cutting his body into several pieces, according to trial evidence.

Mr. Justice Paul Carney said at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin that it was “the most grotesque killing that has occurred in my professional lifetime.”

The sentencing this week of 23-year-old daughter Charlotte Mulhall for the murder of Kenyan Fareh Swaleh Noor and of her older sister Linda, aged 31, for his manslaughter followed some of the most gruesome evidence ever heard in Ireland at the October trial.

Mother-of-one Charlotte was jailed for life -– an automatic sentence — and Linda, who is expecting her fifth child, was imprisoned for 15 years, the toughest sentence for manslaughter in 10 years.

Interpol, at the request of the Gardai (Irish police), are still searching for the girls’ mother Kathleen who, their trial heard, instructed them to ”just kill him for me” when he made a pass at one of her daughters following a drink and drugs-fueled outing on March 20 of last year.

The slaughter happened at Kathleen’s Dublin city center apartment. Charlotte slit Noor’s throat with a Stanley knife and he was stabbed 27 times. It may have been more, but pathologists had no opportunity to examine the severed head or penis. They were never found.

Linda cut off Noor’s penis so he couldn’t rape her mother anymore, and she also sat on a toilet seat as she used a bread knife to saw off his legs.

The girls’ father, described by friends as “a decent, working-class man” who was estranged from their mother, hanged himself in Phoenix Park when they were charged with the killing.

It came to police notice only after Noor’s leg, with a sock on the end, was seen floating in Dublin’s Royal Canal 10 days after the attack on him at the apartment a few hundred yards from Croke Park. Garda sub-aqua divers retrieved most of the rest of his body in seven parts.

The sisters seemed relaxed and cheerful when they were led into the courtroom for sentencing Monday.

Attempts by both the prosecution and defense lawyers to have sentencing deferred –- for psychiatric reports on the sisters and for Noor’s mother to be flown from Kenya –- were dismissed by the judge.

As the harrowing details already given in evidence were recounted along with details of the sisters’ dysfunctional family background their lawyers pleaded mitigation. They argued that both were good mothers, had cooperated with police and were very remorseful.

Charlotte’s future was a foregone conclusion -– her murder conviction carries a mandatory life sentence.

When Linda was described as being a good mother the judge intervened to observe that there had been evidence that she wanted to make trifle for the children rather than accompany police in searches for the body parts.

“I cannot quite accept that someone who put herself in this situation is a good mother,” he said.

The judge noted, however, that she had been “highly cooperative” with the investigation and was frank in her admissions. That allowed him to give her 15 years instead of 18.

As the sisters were led away from the courtroom Linda wept audibly.

Throughout the case it was never established -– apart from her instruction to “kill him” -– what Kathleen Mulhall was doing while her daughters hammered and sawed at Noor’s body.

Kathleen is believed to have vanished after first fleeing to London.