A man who killed his son and dumped his body in an outback mine shaft is one step away from being discharged from a mental health facility, a South Australian court has heard.
Aliya Zilic, 46, was found not guilty of murdering his three-year-old son at Coober Pedy because he was mentally incompetent at the time.
A court has previously heard that Mr Zilic thought his son Imran was possessed by the devil when he killed the boy in April 2008.
Supreme Court Justice Laura Stein today approved an application by Mr Zilic's lawyer Trish Johnson to allow her client overnight release from Ashton House, a mental health unit for those found not guilty due to mental incompetence.
Ms Johnson said Mr Zilic would start with release one night per week and build up to five until an application was made for him to be fully discharged.
The application for unsupervised overnight release was not opposed by the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Commissioner for Victims' Rights.
"The next transition will be an important one from the victim's perspective," a lawyer for the commissioner told the court.
Mr Zilic was detained at high-security mental health facility James Nash House but has since been moved to less secure Ashton House.
He has progressively been granted more freedoms but will remain supervised in the community for the rest of his life.
In 2008, Mr Zilic took his son from his mother's home in Perth before killing him and dumping his body down the disused shaft at Coober Pedy.
Mr Zilic was found after a police search across South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, where he was taken into custody.
Mr Zilic was then extradited to South Australia.
During his murder trial, the court heard Mr Zilic was psychotic and believed his estranged wife was working for the devil and that his son was the devil's helper.
The court was told that Mr Zilic had religiously motivated hallucinations and heard voices, and that he had stopped taking antipsychotic medication.
