Woolworths said that it had revised its scripting in light of the complaints, adding that most of the feedback on Olive’s “personality” had been “very positive”.

Reddit users said that they had grown frustrated with the bot after it started talking about “memories of its mother” and engaging in “fake banter”.

The grocer is one of many major retailers to have rolled out AI customer service assistants in recent years to help with routine issues.

The retailer’s attempt to humanise its chat bot may have backfired, as some users said that Olive was “obnoxious,” while another said that they found its small talk “aggravating.”

“The fake banter made me haaaaate [sic] it,” wrote one customer on Reddit.

“It asked me for my date of birth and when I gave it, it started rambling about how its mother was born in the same year” another Reddit user, who had tried to rearrange a delivery, said.

“The ick cringe factor whilst wasting completely unnecessary time was enough to make me hate Olive and wish her harm.”

Another user on X said that Olive “started talking about its memories of its mother and her angry voice” and “kept claiming to be a real person.”

A Woolworths spokesperson said in a statement to the BBC that the responses about birthdays had been written by a human.

“Olive has been around since 2018. Over this time, customer feedback for Olive has been very positive, with many noting its personality,” they said.

“A number of responses about birthdays were written for Olive by a team member several years ago as a more personal way for Olive to connect with customers.

“As a result of customer feedback, we recently removed this particular scripting.”

In January, the supermarket announced that it was teaming up with Google to give its virtual assistant extra features, including meal planning and sourcing ingredients from recipes uploaded by customers.

Around 80% of customer service leaders told Gartner that they were exploring or deploying AI agents last year – but that only 20% of the plans were meeting expectations.

Companies have said the technology can speed up transactions and save workers’ time on routine tasks, but the technology can be prone to hallucinations, causing it to behave unexpectedly.

Researchers have said that while AI can be helpful extracting information from vast amounts of data, it can go awry if it is expected to produce “original” responses.

In 2024, the parcel delivery firm DPD disabled part of its online chatbot after it started writing poetry and swearing at customers.

Chris Webster was a key witness in Patterson’s trial, at which a jury found her guilty of killing three relatives and attempting to kill another with a deadly mushroom lunch in 2023.

After the verdicts, Dr Webster told BBC that Patterson – now serving a life sentence – was a “heinous individual” and called her a “disturbed sociopathic nut-bag” in an interview with the Herald Sun.

The Medical Board of Australia found his actions were inappropriate and ordered that the general practitioner undergo ethics, privacy and social media training.

An investigation was launched when the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra) received a flood of complaints about Dr Webster’s media interviews and use of explicit language.

Dr Webster told the BBC on Friday that he understood and accepted the decision from regulators – who have not publicly commented on his case but listed the conditions on a public register.

“As far as my comments go, I stand by them,” said Dr Webster, who still works as a GP in Patterson’s home town of Leongatha, in regional Victoria.

He said that regulators did not find any breach of patient confidentiality, as he was talking about matters that had been openly discussed in the murder trial.

“I was found to be inappropriate in my professionalism,” he said, “and that has to do with the use of salty language and my use of social media.”

The Australian woman was last month found guilty of murdering three relatives – and attempting to kill another – with a toxic mushroom-laced beef Wellington.

The 50-year-old was originally charged with three counts of attempted murder against her estranged husband Simon Patterson, but these charges were dropped without explanation on the eve of her trial.

The details of the allegations, which Patterson denied, were suppressed to protect the proceedings, but can now be made public for the first time.

Three people died in hospital in the days after the lunch on 29 July 2023: Patterson’s former in-laws, Don Patterson, 70, and Gail Patterson, 70, as well as Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66.

Local pastor Ian Wilkinson – Heather’s husband – recovered after weeks of treatment in hospital.

In lengthy pre-trial hearings last year, Mr Patterson had detailed what he suspected was a years-long campaign to kill him with tainted food – including one episode which had left him so ill he spent weeks in a coma and his family was twice told to say their goodbyes.

Camping trips and packed lunches

In a quiet moment during the early days of Patterson’s trial, her estranged husband choked up as he explained his sorrow to a near empty courtroom.

Mr Patterson’s parents and his aunt had been killed, and his uncle almost died too, after eating the toxic meal prepared by his wife. He had narrowly avoided the same fate, pulling out of the lunch gathering the day before.

“I have a lot to grieve,” he said to the judge, sitting in the witness box as the jury prepared to return from a break.

“The legal process has been very difficult… especially the way it’s progressed in terms of the charges relating to me and my evidence about that – or non-evidence now, I guess.”

“I’m sitting here, half thinking about the things I’m not allowed to talk about and… I don’t actually understand why. It seems bizarre to me, but it is what it is.”

What he wasn’t allowed to talk about – the elephant in the room throughout the trial – was his claim that Patterson had been trying to poison him long before the fatal lunch that destroyed his family on 29 July 2023.

Mr Patterson gave evidence during pre-trial hearings, which are a standard part of the court process and allow judges to determine what evidence is admissible – or allowed to be presented to a jury.

As the charges relating to Mr Patterson were dropped, his evidence on the matter was excluded from the raft of information presented at the nine-week trial this year.

But he had explained that, as far as he knows, it all began with a Tupperware container of Bolognese penne in November 2021.

Mr Patterson and his wife had separated in 2015 – though they still aren’t divorced – and he thought they remained on amicable terms.

Under questioning from Patterson’s lawyer, Mr Patterson confirmed he had noticed “nothing untoward” in their relationship at that point: “If by ‘nothing untoward’, you mean anything that would make me think she would try and kill me, correct.”

But after eating that meal, he began suffering from vomiting and diarrhoea, and spent a night in hospital.

“I had the idea I got sick from Erin’s food. I did not give it too much thought,” he said in his police statement, according to The Age newspaper.

Months later, in May 2022, he fell ill again after eating a chicken korma curry prepared by Patterson on a camping trip in the rugged mountains and alpine scruff of Victoria’s High Country region.

“While Erin was preparing food I was getting the fire going so I didn’t watch her prepare it,” he told the court.

Within days, he was in a coma in a Melbourne hospital, and a large part of his bowel was surgically removed in a bid to save his life.

“My family were asked to come and say goodbye to me twice, as I was not expected to live,” he said in a 2022 Facebook post, reported by The South Gippsland Sentinel Times two years ago.

In September 2022, while visiting a stunning, isolated stretch of Victorian coastline, he would become desperately unwell again after eating a vegetable wrap.

At first, he felt nausea and diarrhoea coming on, the court heard, before his symptoms escalated. He started slurring his speech, gradually lost control of his muscles, and began “fitting”.

“By the end of the journey [to hospital], all I could move was my neck, my tongue and lips,” he told the court.

The food diary and chapel meeting

A family friend who was a doctor, Christopher Ford, suggested Mr Patterson start a food diary so they could try to figure out what was making him so sick.

“I couldn’t understand why these things kept on happening to him in such a way that he had essentially three near-death experiences,” Dr Ford told the court.

Mr Patterson returned to see him in February 2023, five months before the fatal lunch, revealing he’d come to believe his estranged wife was responsible.

He told Dr Ford about a batch of cookies supposedly baked by his daughter, which he feared were treats tainted – possibly with antifreeze chemicals – by his wife, who had called repeatedly to check whether he had eaten any.

The court would hear investigators never figured out what Patterson had allegedly been feeding him, though they suspected rat poison may have been used on at least one occasion, and had found a file on Patterson’s computer with information about the toxin.

After this discovery, Mr Patterson changed his medical power of attorney, removing his wife, and quietly told a handful of family members of his fears.

The court heard that his father Don Patterson responded diplomatically, but his sister Anna Terrington told the pre-trial hearings she had believed her brother, and was anxious when she learned about the lunch Patterson had planned.

Ms Terrington called her parents the night before to warn them.

“Dad said, ‘No, we’ll be ok’,” she said.

Five days later, she gathered in a Melbourne hospital chapel alongside her brother and other worried relatives. Down the hall, deteriorating in their beds, were Don and Gail Patterson and Heather and Ian Wilkinson.

Ruth Dubois, the Wilkinsons’ daughter, told the pre-trial hearings Simon Patterson had assembled the group to tell them he suspected his previous grave illnesses were the work of his wife.

“[He said] he had stopped eating food than Erin had prepared, because he suspected Erin had been messing with it,” she said.

“He was really sorry that he hadn’t told our family before this… but he thought he was the only person she was targeting, and that they’d be safe.”

Bizarre evidence

It was also revealed that Patterson had visited a local tip the afternoon of the lunch at her house, though it is unknown what, if anything, she disposed of there.

The jury heard that she had travelled to the same dump days after the lunch to get rid of a food dehydrator used to prepare the meal, but the judge ruled they couldn’t be told about the first visit.

Other bizarre evidence which was ultimately left out of the trial included a 2020 post to a poisons help forum on Facebook, in which Patterson claimed her cat had eaten some mushrooms under a tree and had vomited, alongside pictures of fungi.

Patterson had never owned a cat, prosecutors said, arguing the post was evidence of a long-standing interest in the poisonous properties of mushrooms.

On Friday, Justice Christopher Beale set down a sentencing hearing for 25 August, where those connected to the case will have the opportunity to give victim impact statements.

Here’s where things stand on Monday 7 July 2025:

• Erin Patterson is found guilty of murdering three of her relatives, and attempting to murder another, at a lunch in 2023
• The 50-year-old cooked and served six beef Wellingtons at her home in Leongatha, regional Victoria – they were later found to contain death cap mushrooms
• Patterson’s in-laws Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, died within days –this graphic shows who else attended the meal
• The prosecution argued Patterson knowingly put the toxic mushrooms in the home-cooked lunch, lied to police and disposed of evidence – they also acknowledged she had no particular motive
• Patterson’s defence was that she accidentally included the poisonous fungi and lied because she panicked – here’s what else she said while giving evidence
• After listening to more than two months of evidence, the jury didn’t believe her and attention now turns to sentencing.

Orange plate and orange cake – the evidence the jury heard

Erin Patterson has said the deaths were a tragic accident. But over nine weeks, the jury heard evidence suggesting this was a case of murder – and decided so today.

Here are some of the key details the jury heard.

An orange plate

Ian Wilkinson, who ate the meal but survived, recalled watching Patterson serve the food – five separate beef Wellingtons onto four grey plates – and an orange one for herself. His wife Heather, who died, had commented on this, according to a witness, saying: “I’ve puzzled about it since lunch… Is Erin short of crockery?”

Patterson had no traces of death cap mushroom poisoning.

In a police interview, detectives asked her: “We’re trying to understand why you’re not that ill.”

An orange cake

But Patterson had her explanation – she ate too much cake.

“I ate another piece of cake, and then another piece,” she said, and before she knew it, the cake was gone and she felt overfull.

“So I went to the toilet and brought it back up again,” Erin told the trial. “After I’d done that, I felt better.”

Red flags

There was also the question of where the mushrooms came from.

Patterson claimed some were bought dried from an Asian grocery store in Melbourne, but she couldn’t say which suburb, the brand, or provide proof of the purchase.

Later, after photos showing what looked like death cap mushrooms being weighed on kitchen scales emerged as evidence, Patterson admitted that she was lying, saying she was “scared”.

No clear motive

Despite this, the prosecution did not present a specific motive, which was key to her defence.

However, in the end, this did not stop the jury from finding Patterson guilty today.

Various exhibits released by the court

A trove of about 100 exhibits shown to the jury have been released after Erin Patterson’s verdict.

The judge has chosen not to release all of the exhibits – mainly keeping concealed those which features or make reference to Patterson’s children. But what we do have gives a sense of the scope of what has been gathered in the course of this investigation and put to the jury by both the prosecution and defence.

Exhibits include CCTV footage of Patterson discharging herself form hospital against medical advice, and of a medic examining leftovers of the meal which police found in Patterson’s bin.

There are also still images of Patterson dumping a food dehydrator at her local tip days after the lunch, which police found had traces of death cap mushrooms on it. She initially lied to police about owning this appliance, despite its manual being found in her kitchen drawer. The receipt for the purchase is also an exhibit – the jury heard that a shop assistant came forward after Patterson’s arrest, having remembered the sale.

Another exhibits is quite poignant and tragic – an entry from Heather Wilkinson’s diary on 29 July 2023, which reads: “Erin’s for Lunch”.

Erin Patterson has 28 days to appeal

Erin Patterson’s time in court may not be over – she can still appeal the guilty verdict, and has 28 days, from the date of her sentencing, to start that process.

Her legal team can either appeal the guilty verdict itself, the sentence handed down or both.

So this means that reporting restrictions are still in place, as under Australian law, media reporting of any trial is restricted to information that has been presented to the jury.

Reporting anything that was not presented to the jury, even if it is publicly known, can be considered contempt of court and may lead to legal repercussions for the media outlet and journalist.

Police ask for privacy of victims’ families to be respected

Speaking briefly to media outside the courtroom, Detective Inspector Dean Thomas, from Victoria Police Homicide Squad, thanked the officers and prosecutors who had worked on the case.

“It’s very important that we remember that three people have died, and we’ve had a person that nearly died and was seriously injured as a result.

“I ask that we acknowledge those people and not forget them.”

He added that the Patterson and Wilkinson families – who were not in court to hear the verdict – have asked for privacy and that their wishes be respected.

‘What is the motive?’

While Patterson has been found guilty of cooking the deadly mushroom lunch that killed three of her relatives and left another seriously ill, the motive is still unclear. There may simply be none.

“You might be wondering, ‘What is the motive?'” said prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC when she spoke to the jury in the trial back in April.

“You might still be wondering this at the end of this trial,” she added.

The prosecution did not suggest a specific motive, with Rogers telling the jury “You do not have to be satisfied what the motive was, or even that there was one”.

Despite this, Rogers said the jury should have “no difficulty” in rejecting the argument that “this was all a horrible foraging accident”.

The defence had argued the lack of motive was key, claiming Patterson had no reason to kill her guests.

Locals hope verdict will give sense of closure

This crime left the local Gippsland region reeling.

The victims have been characterised as pillars of their communities, loved by many.

David Peters didn’t know them, but was so touched by their case he travelled to Morwell to sit in court many times over the past 10 weeks.

He says the local community – particularly those personally touched by the crime – would be relieved by today’s verdicts.

“Overall, I think that most people in the community would agree with the result today,” he said.

Mr Peters added that his thoughts were with the families of those who died, who were not in court today.

“I hope they will have a sense of closure and a sense of justice.”

Victoria Police responds to guilty verdict

State police have issued a statement in the wake of the trial verdict.

“Our thoughts are with the respective families at this time and we acknowledge how difficult these past two years have been for them,” a spokesperson from Victoria Police said in the statement, ABC News reports.

“We will continue to support them in every way possible following this decision.”

The Patterson and Wilkinson families have asked for privacy, the statement added.

What did Patterson say on the witness stand?

Erin Patterson claimed that while preparing the beef Wellington meal she added mushrooms from a container in her pantry – which she later realised may have included both store-bought and foraged mushrooms.

She also claimed that all six individual beef Wellingtons she made were the same and that she did not intentionally put death cap mushrooms in the dish.

Patterson told the court she had suffered from bulimia for years and had made herself throw up after the meal – something her defence team said explained why she did not become as sick as the others who ate the meal.

A lie to her guests about having cancer was because she was embarrassed about plans to get weight-loss surgery, Patterson said.

And she said she didn’t tell authorities the truth about her mushroom foraging hobby because she feared they might blame her for making her relatives sick.

Beef Wellington laced with poisonous mushrooms and the trial that followed

Erin Patterson had argued it was all a terrible accident. After listening to more than two months of evidence, the jury didn’t believe her.

Patterson, 50, said she loved her in-laws and had no reason to kill them – claiming she wanted the lunch to be special.

What she served was beef Wellington cooked with death cap mushrooms: deadly fungi which prosecutors said she had sought out and picked to use as a murder weapon.

Her four guests soon fell seriously ill. Within days, three were dead.

In the days that followed Patterson tried to cover her tracks, dumping a dehydrator she used to prepare the mushrooms and keeping quiet as her relatives lay dying.

Prosecutors accused her of telling so many lies it was hard to keep track.

Patterson will have 28 days to appeal against her conviction after she is sentenced.

Who is Erin Patterson?

Erin Trudi Patterson, who turned 50 while awaiting trial, has had a varied career, including as an accountant, an air traffic controller and an animal welfare worker – where, in the early 2000s, she met Simon Patterson.

In court, Simon spoke of her as a “quite witty”, “funny” and “very intelligent” woman – and of a friendship that slowly turned romantic.

They married in 2007 and had their first of two children soon after. And though they separated in 2015, they remain married today – despite what was portrayed in court as an often fractious relationship.

Erin helped out at the church Simon attended, edited a local community newsletter and – the trial heard – joined true crime Facebook groups.

Financially, Erin told the court she was very comfortable. The jury heard of generous inheritances from her grandmother and her mother and a portfolio of properties – including the Leongatha home where she served the fateful lunch.

In another nod to Erin’s wealth, the jury also heard of cash loans to family totalling over A$1m (£483,000), with very relaxed repayment plans.

Erin told the court that at the start of 2023, she had been accepted into a bachelor of nursing and midwifery, which she’d chosen to defer for a year.

Life, however, has panned out very differently.

What’s next?published at 06:5106:51

Now that Patterson has been found guilty, she will be remanded while the prosecutors and defence make proposals on what they think her sentence should be.

The sentencing hearing will take place on a date that is yet to be set.

Patterson can also still appeal against today’s guilty verdict.

A timeline of the mushroom murders case

Erin Patterson’s triple-murder trial centres around a lunch she served at her home in Leongatha, regional Victoria, in 2023.

Here are some of the key moments of the case.

Two weeks before the lunch

• Erin invites her estranged husband Simon Patterson, his parents Don and Gail Patterson, Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, and Heather’s husband Ian Wilkinson – a local pastor – for a lunch on Saturday 29 July

24 hours before the lunch

• Simon cancels as he feels “too uncomfortable” given recent tensions between the estranged couple

29 July, day of the lunch

• Everyone, including Erin, eats the homemade meal and hours later, they all report feeling ill

30 July

• All four guests are admitted to hospital with severe nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea

1/2 August

• Within days of the lunch, all four guests are on life support with advanced multiple organ failure. Erin is discharged from hospital and dumps the dehydrator she used to dry wild mushrooms at a local tip

4/5 August

• Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson all die from mushroom poisoning. Police recover the dumped food dehydrator from the local tip

22 September

• Ian Wilkinson is discharged from hospital after weeks in an induced coma

2 November

• Erin is charged with the three counts of murder and one of attempted murder. Four other attempted murder charges are dropped before her trial

Courtroom clears

The judge now clears the courtroom so Patterson can have a moment to confer with her lawyers.

It’s all over and done in ten minutes.

Judge thanks the jury

“You’ve been an exceptional jury,” Justice Christopher Beale tells the 12 jurors, before giving them a dispensation from jury service for 15 years.

Patterson remains calm and quiet

Her eyes on the jury throughout, Erin Patterson remained silent and composed as they delivered verdicts which could see her spend the rest of her life in prison.

Briton Norris described his win as “stressful but rewarding”.

The first adjective was justified by the conditions in a madcap, crash-strewn, incident-packed race where one small error can spell disaster – as it very nearly did for Norris himself at one point.

The second adjective was a recognition of the fact that this was exactly the kind of race in which, last year, McLaren had proved less than perfect, and thrown away at least one potential victory, and perhaps another, too.

But in Melbourne they were as perfect as it is possible to be in conditions such as these – even the renowned rain-master Max Verstappen slipped up at one point. And Norris and McLaren came through the chaos unscathed.

The fine line between victory and defeat was underlined by an incident with 13 laps to go that defined the race.

Norris was leading from team-mate Oscar Piastri and Verstappen as a heavy shower of rain approached the track.

It hit as the leaders were negotiating the final corners on lap 44, with 13 to go.

Both McLarens ran wide on to the gravel at the exit of Turn 12, and Australian Piastri then spun through Turn 13.

Norris was able to continue without losing too much time, but Piastri ended up on the grass on the outside of Turn 12, where he sat with his wheels spinning helplessly for what seemed like an age as his hopes of victory at home evaporated before finally rejoining. He fought back to ninth by the end.

Norris immediately pitted for treaded tyres. That decision won him the race, and demonstrated how far he and the team had come since last year – they had planned that they would pit as soon as it rained, and acted decisively on the plan.

Verstappen stayed out and took the lead, but as the rain intensified he lost more time, and Norris resumed the lead when the Dutchman pitted himself two laps later.

Norris said: “It’s so easy to make a mistake, so easy to ruin everything. So quickly it can all have gone wrong within a second.

“Any second of the race, you lock up, you hit the white line wrong, you have a big snap. It was just very, very difficult at times to just not go into a hole or a tyre barrier somewhere.

“That’s a big enough challenge, but then when you’ve got the weather changing and the track conditions changing, knowing when to make the correct decision to change on to a slick tyre and stay out on the inter-tyre, and then even more when I’ve got Max behind me and Oscar behind me, it’s stressful.

“But that’s what makes it rewarding.

“We worked a lot over the winter to prepare for a race like this, because it’s where we threw away a lot of opportunities last season – Canada, Silverstone, where we were not the best at preparing and knowing how decisive we’ve got to be.

“Today we were very, very decisive, calling to box five metres before I boxed. But it was the right call in the end, and that won us the race.”

The race was not over, though.

In the final five laps after the final restart, Norris had Verstappen right behind him. The McLaren was hampered by significant floor damage – incurred either in the previously mentioned off, or in another in those final laps at Turn Six – but he hung on, despite Verstappen being less than a second behind, and having use of the DRS overtaking aid.

The 25-year-old Norris, for whom last season was his first fighting consistently at the front, underlined his inexperience when he said: “That situation was new for me. I’ve not ever led a race with five laps to go with Max behind me, trying to put me under pressure, and in these conditions.

“Maybe Max has had that a few times in his race against Lewis (Hamilton) a lot, and he can just deal with that probably better than I can.

“I’m happy I got through it and stayed calm. It’s something I improved from last year.”

McLaren’s performance was as expected. They were the quickest car all weekend and delivered on a status as favourites that Norris acknowledged both before and after the race was justified.

They earned it in pre-season testing, but Norris said that, while the long run in Bahrain two weeks ago had demonstrated their strong pace, the car was not necessarily as good as some felt it looked there.

The job, he emphasised, was only just beginning, and not all races would be like this.

“The car’s flying,” Norris said. “But we’re going to have races where we are going to struggle.

“[If] we race in Bahrain as round one, I wouldn’t be confident that we could win the race.

“But I’m confident that we’re going to, say, China next weekend, and we can be very, very strong, because we were strong there last year, with not a very good car.”

In the post-race news conference, with Verstappen and Mercedes’ George Russell either side of him, Norris also pointed out that he felt that Piastri’s presence alongside him was partly responsible for McLaren’s strong weekend, making a pointed reference to the rookie team-mates of his rivals.

“Let’s allow a few more races to take place before we start making any (predictions), but we’re the favourites, we are the team to beat, mainly because we have two drivers up there pushing each other,” he said.

“That helps. Do I think me and Oscar working together yesterday, in terms of pushing one another, allowed us to get one and a half, one 10th more than the two drivers here, because their team-mates aren’t as equipped and as experienced? Yes.”

Verstappen and Russell, meanwhile, were talking as if they know that McLaren will take some beating.

Verstappen was reflecting on the fact that he lost 15 seconds to the McLarens over the first stint as the track dried.

“As the tyres started to overheat we had no chance,” he said. “Yet basically McLaren just took off.

“We still have a lot of work to do to fight for a win, but I’m very happy that we are second here. It’s basically one place better than we should have been. We’ll do our best.”

Russell added: “They look pretty good and groovy at the moment, so we’ll see.”

Toyah Cordingley was stabbed at least 26 times while out walking her dog in October 2018.

The 24-year-old’s body was discovered by her father, half-buried in sand dunes on Wangetti beach between the popular tourist hotspots of Cairns and Port Douglas.

Rajwinder Singh, 40, who travelled to India the day after Ms Cordingley’s body was found, was charged with murder. He was arrested and then extradited to Australia in 2023.

But jurors at Cairns Supreme Court said they were deadlocked, and unable to reach a unanimous decision on his guilt after two-and-half days of deliberations. The judge thanked the jury for their “diligence”.

Under Queensland law, jury verdicts in murder cases must be unanimous. So Mr Singh will face another trial.

Originally from Buttar Kalan in the Indian state of Punjab, Mr Singh had been living in Innisfail at the time of the killing, a town about two hours south from the crime scene.

Prosecutors said they did not have a motive for the killing of Ms Cordingley – a health store worker and animal shelter volunteer – and there was no evidence of a sexual assault.

The trial at Cairns Supreme court heard that DNA highly likely to be Mr Singh’s was discovered on a stick in the victim’s grave.

Data from mobile phone towers also suggested Ms Cordingley’s phone had moved in a similar pattern to Mr Singh’s blue Alfa Romeo car on the day the victim went missing.

The prosecution also suggested the hurried way Mr Singh left Australia without saying goodbye to his family or colleagues pointed to his guilt.

Mr Singh had denied murder – and had told an undercover police officer he had seen the killing, then left the country, leaving behind his wife and children because he feared for his own life.

His defence lawyer said he was “a coward” but not a killer, and accused police of a “flawed” investigation that did not look sufficiently at other possible suspects.

They said DNA found at the scene, including on the victim’s discarded selfie stick, did not match Mr Singh’s profile.

“There is an unknown person’s DNA at that grave site,” defence barrister Angus Edwards told the jury.

Norris and his McLaren team made the right calls in a race punctuated by crashes, three safety cars and an aborted start as the Briton put together a statement drive at the start of a season he intends to end as world champion.

Norris was forced to fend off a late threat from Verstappen, brought back into contention by a late safety car, but held on to take his fifth career victory.

Lewis Hamilton, making his debut for Ferrari, finished 10th on a difficult day for the team, with George Russell third for Mercedes in Melbourne.

Seven-time champion Hamilton was leading on lap 46 but only because Ferrari had made the wrong decision to stay out on dry-weather slick tyres as a heavy shower hit the track.

He and team-mate Charles Leclerc then had to pit as a safety car was sent out for the final time following a series of crashes and dropped to the bottom of the top 10.

To add insult to injury, Hamilton was overtaken by Leclerc on the final restart, as the Monegasque sought to recover from a spin at Turn 11 under the safety car that cost him four positions, the Ferraris touching wheels lightly in the incident.

Hamilton then lost a further place as McLaren’s Oscar Piastri fought back from a spin that had cost him second place in the late rain.

Mercedes’ 18-year-old Italian rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli came through the field from 16th on the grid to fourth with Williams’ Alex Albon fifth.

Antonelli finished fourth on the road but was initially demoted a place for an unsafe release in the pits. However, that penalty was later overturned by the stewards on appeal.

McLaren acknowledged a concern that Verstappen would be a major threat, so good is he so often in wet conditions, but Norris and Piastri controlled the race from the start and were able to leave the four-time champion behind them for much of the race as chaos unfolded behind them.

The drama began even before the race officially started, when rookie Isack Hadjar spun his Racing Bull car at Turn Two on the formation lap. The Frenchman stood with his head in his hands, apparently crying, before returning to the pits.

After a 15-minute delay, the race finally got under way, only for another rookie, Australian Jack Doohan, to crash his Alpine on the straight between Turns Four and Six and bring out the safety car.

Underlining the difficulty of the conditions, Carlos Sainz immediately crashed his Williams at the final corner as well.

When the race finally got properly under way, Norris led but Verstappen passed Piastri to run second, only to lose the position when he ran wide at Turn 11 on lap 17, gifting McLaren a one-two.

The McLarens first stablished their position and then, as they looked after their intermediate tyres more effectively than the Red Bull, built a lead running nose to tail. They pulled 16 seconds on Verstappen by the time the safety car came out for a second time following a crash by Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin at Turn Six on lap 33, just after half distance.

The leaders pitted for slick tyres but there was fresh jeopardy as they waited for the restart – a rain shower was coming in, and the teams could see that it would bring heavy rain for a short period, but long enough to require a tyre change.

Norris was keen to pre-empt the conditions and stop for treaded intermediate tyres early, but was warned that they had to be on the right tyres at the right time.

When the rain came on lap 44, with 13 to go, it brought pandemonium.

Both McLaren drivers spun at the penultimate corner. Norris was able to rejoin and dive into the pits for intermediate tyres, but Piastri was stuck on the grass. There was a degree of black comedy as he sat on the grass, his tyres spinning furiously, before finally managing to reverse back on to the track.

Verstappen stayed out and took the lead for two laps, but as the rain intensified, he eventually had to admit defeat and stop.

This was when Ferrari made their fateful error, leaving Hamilton and Leclerc out, to assume first and second places, only to immediately lose them as they scrabbled for grip for a lap and had to pit anyway.

Liam Lawson then crashed his Red Bull, a disappointing end to a difficult first race for the senior team, and Gabriel Bortoleto blotted an otherwise strong start to his career for Sauber, and the safety car was deployed again.

When the race restarted with five laps to go, Norris initially made a third consecutive excellent restart and built a lead over Verstappen.

But when he ran a little wide at Turn Six, he allowed Verstappen to close within a second and gain the use of the DRS overtaking aid, giving Norris a nervous final couple of laps.

But he held on calmly as Russell followed Verstappen over the line to take the final podium position.

Lance Stroll made up for Alonso’s error to take sixth for Aston Martin, ahead of Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg, Leclerc, Piastri and Hamilton.

Australia’s Home Affairs minister Tony Burke had earlier said his department was reviewing whether it could revoke Ms Jones’s visa, but the BBC understands that she left the country of her own accord.

“There has never been a better time to be a baby wombat,” Burke said in a short statement on Friday celebrating Jones’s departure.

Anger erupted across Australia after Jones posted a video of her taking a baby wombat from the side of a road while laughing and running away from the distraught mother wombat.

The video also shows the baby wombat hissing in distress before Jones then returns it to the bush.

Jones, who also goes by the name Samantha Strable, has nearly 100,000 followers and describes herself as an “outdoor enthusiast and hunter” on her Instagram profile. She has since made her account private and deleted her post.

Her video was swiftly met with widespread condemnation, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calling the incident an “outrage”.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong called the video “dreadful”.

On Friday, opposition leader Peter Dutton said he thought it was “a cruel act” and that he was “glad” the influencer has now left.

An online petition demanding Jones be deported from Australia garnered more than 30,000 signatures.

However, as Jones had not been charged nor been deemed a threat to the country – the government may not have had any grounds to cancel her visa.

In since-deleted comments, Jones said “the baby was carefully held for one minute in total and then released back to mom”.

“They wandered back off into the bush together completely unharmed,” she wrote. “I don’t ever capture wildlife that will be harmed by my doing so.”

But wildlife experts have deemed Jones’s act a “blatant disregard” for native wildlife.

The Wombat Protection Society said it was shocked to see the “mishandling of a wombat joey in an apparent snatch for ‘social media likes'”.

Suzanne Milthorpe, Head of Campaigns at World Animal Protection Australia, told BBC Newsday that posting such a video for “cheap content” was “unacceptable”.

“To that baby it must have seemed like a giant predator was picking it up and taking it away,” she said.

Wombats, which are native to Australia, are a legally protected species across the country. Baby wombats share a strong bond with their mothers, and any separation can be distressing and harmful, conservationists say.

A new TikTok account claiming to be Jones after her original account was allegedly banned, published a post on Thursday saying that “the hate is currently too much for me to handle” and that there had been “hundreds” of death threats.

“Imagine someone just goes up to your child and curses at them? Let’s have some respect,” the post said.

Most, however, have remained critical of Jones’s act.

“Maybe imagine if someone picked up your child and laughed while you screamed for them to give them back,” read a comment under the post, a reference to Jones’s snatching of the wombat from its mother.

The caravan, which was found in north-western Sydney on 19 January, contained enough explosives to produce a 40m-wide blast, along with a note displaying antisemitic messages and a list of Jewish synagogues.

Its discovery, following a spate of antisemitic attacks in Australia, triggered widespread panic.

But on Monday, Australian Federal Police (AFP) revealed that they knew “almost immediately” that the caravan was “essentially a criminal con job”.

AFP’s deputy commissioner of national security, Krissy Barrett, said investigators within the New South Wales Joint Counter Terrorism Team believed that the caravan was “part of a fabricated terrorism plot”.

Authorities arrived at that belief based on information they already had, the ease with which they found the caravan and the visibility of the explosives contained inside – as well as the fact that there was no detonator.

Yet police refrained from telling the public that they believed the plot was fake “out of an abundance of caution”, as they continued to receive tip-offs about other related terror plots. They are now confident that these tip-offs were also fabricated, Ms Barrett said.

The fake caravan plot involved several people with different levels of involvement, according to police. Between them, they had planned to purchase a caravan, load it with explosives and antisemitic materials and leave it in a specific location, before informing law enforcement about “an impending terror attack against Jewish Australians”.

Ms Barrett described it as “an elaborate scheme contrived by organised criminals, domestically and from offshore”, adding that the leader of the plot maintained a distance and hired alleged local criminals to carry out parts of the operation.

That individual is a known organised crime figure, Ms Barrett confirmed. She also added that while no arrests had been made in relation to the incident, police have a number of ongoing targets both in Australia and offshore.

“Too many criminals are accused of paying others to carry out antisemitic or terrorism incidents to get our attention or divert our resources,” Ms Barrett said. She also noted that police believe “the person pulling the strings wanted changes to their criminal status”.

BBC News contacted AFP for more details on the suspected agenda of those behind the caravan hoax, but received no further comment.

“Regardless of the motivation of those responsible for this fake plot, this has had a chilling effect on the Jewish community,” Ms Barrett said in her statement.

“What organised crime has done to the Jewish community is reprehensible, and it won’t go without consequence. There was also unwarranted suspicion directed at other communities – and that is also reprehensible.”

Separately, New South Wales police arrested 14 people on Monday morning as part of Strike Force Pearl: a police operation established in December 2024 to investigate antisemitic hate crimes across Sydney.

The establishment of the Strike Force followed a string of antisemitic attacks in Australia in late-2024, including the vandalism of a Jewish school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and the arson of a childcare centre, which was set alight and sprayed with antisemitic messages.

Speaking to the media on Monday, police said they believed all those incidents had a “common source” with the caravan plot.

“The caravan job was orchestrated by the same individual or individuals that were orchestrating the Pearl incidents,” said NSW Police deputy commissioner David Hudson.

Mr Hudson further noted, however, that “none of the individuals we have arrested during Pearl have displayed any form of antisemitic ideology.”

“I think what these organised crime heads have done is play to vulnerabilities in the community,” he later explained.

“Obviously there have been antisemitic attacks of a lower nature, and a lot of anger and angst in the community – we’ve seen that since October 7th, 2023… And I think these organised crime figures have taken an opportunity to play on the vulnerability of the Jewish community.”

David Harrop from Warwickshire, who was in Brisbane, Queensland, for work when the storm landed on Saturday night, said it had been frightening to experience and caused “severe damage” and brought serious flooding.

He said a “beautiful” nearby beach had been completely eroded by the winds and the rain had been so heavy it had stripped the branches off trees.

The cyclone was downgraded to a tropical storm when it reached land, but still brought winds of up to 85km/h and forced tens of thousands to evacuate their homes.

Alfred was thought to be the region’s first tropical cyclone in 50 years and Mr Harrop said it caused most of Brisbane to lose its power.

“Driving through Brisbane city was like a ghost town, hardly a single person to be seen in the city’s streets,” he said.

When the storm was at its most fierce he said the noise came in surges and was eerily quiet at times and the damage had been unpredictable.

The house he was staying in was largely unharmed, but others in the area were badly damaged he said.

Mr Harrop had hoped to have a holiday in Australia while he was out there, but his plans are now uncertain.

But it was not the first cyclone he has experienced.

He was in New Zealand two years ago when Cyclone Gabrielle hit and said friends have told him: “Either I’m follow them, or they’re following me.”