The Sydney gang rapes were a series of gang rape attacks committed by a group of up to 14 youths led by Bilal Skaf against Australian women and teenage girls as young as 14, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia across several days in 2000. The crimes, described as ethnically motivated hate crimes by officials and commentators, [1] [2] were covered extensively by the news media, and prompted the passing of new laws. In 2002, the nine men convicted of the gang rapes were sentenced to a total of more than 240 years in jail. According to court transcripts, Judge Michael Finnane described the rapes as events that "you hear about or read about only in the context of wartime atrocities". [3]
Date | Week day | Event |
---|---|---|
10 August 2000 | Thursday | Attackers offered a ride and a portion of cannabis to two teenage girls aged 17 and 18. The women were taken by the attackers to Northcote Park, Greenacre where more collaborators were waiting. The women were then forced to fellate eight males. [4] |
12 August 2000 | Saturday | A 16-year-old girl was brought to Gosling Park, Greenacre by 17-year-old Mohammed Skaf, who she believed was her friend. At the park she was raped by Mohammed's brother Bilal Skaf and one other man, with twelve other men present who she said were "standing around, laughing and talking in their own language". [5] The second man held a gun to her head and kicked her in the stomach before she was able to escape. [6] |
30 August 2000 | Wednesday | Another woman was approached by attackers at the Bankstown railway station, who proposed she join them in smoking some cannabis at another location. She agreed and went with them. However, she was taken to three separate locations by the men and raped 25 times by a total of fourteen men in an ordeal that lasted six hours. After the attacks the woman was hosed down with a fire hose. The woman, who was known during the trial as 'C' to protect her identity, later told her story to 60 Minutes . She told of how the attackers called her an "Aussie Pig", asked her if "Leb cock tasted better than Aussie cock" and explained to her that she would now be raped "Leb-style". [3] |
4 September 2000 | Monday | Two girls, both 16, were taken by the attackers from Beverly Hills railway station to a house in another suburb, where three men repeatedly raped them over a period of five hours. One of the victims was told that "You deserve it because you're an Australian". Due to a plea bargain and the victims not testifying in person, several aggravating factors – kidnap, threats to kill and knife use – were dropped from the prosecution of this crime, without the victims' knowledge. [7] |
A further series of gang rapes were said to have been attempted but thwarted. Four of the attackers were also convicted for an attack on Friday 4 August 2000 when they approached a fourteen-year-old girl on a train where she was threatened with violence, punched twice, slapped, [8] and told that she would be forced to perform fellatio on several men and that she was going to be raped. [4]
There was evidence to convict only nine men of the fourteen suspects. The sentences totalled 240 years in prison.
Conservative commentators such as Miranda Devine categorised the crimes as racially or religiously motivated hate crimes. [1] [2] She also asserted that much of the media had attempted to "airbrush" the racial element out of reporting on the crime spree; the victims said that all mention of the overtly racist statements made by the perpetrators had been "censored" from their official statements because their presence would complicate attempts to negotiate guilty pleas with the accused. Critics also claimed that, if the situation had been reversed, with a gang of white Australian men raping Muslim Australians "who deserved it because they were Muslim", there would have been very different treatment.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the rapists had stated to a victim during the attack, "You deserve it because you're an Australian" and "I'm going to fuck you Leb-style". Two thirds of Muslim and Arab Australians said that they experienced an increase in racial vilification towards them after a number of events including the September 11 attacks, the Bali bombings, and these rapes. [31]
The gang rapes led to the passage of new legislation through the Parliament of New South Wales, increasing the sentences for gang rapists by creating a new category of crime known as "aggravated sexual assault in company". [32]
Also, in the course of one of the trials, the defendants refused counsel as they believed that "all lawyers were against Muslims". This led to the contentious prospect of the defendants being able to cross-examine the witnesses, including the victims, a situation that was averted by further legislation being put through the state parliament. [33]
Actions taken by government ministers, including Premier of New South Wales Bob Carr, who publicly identified the perpetrators' background, led to controversy. Ethnic community group leaders, including Keysar Trad of the Lebanese Muslim Association, complained that Carr was smearing the entire Lebanese Muslim community with the crimes of a few of its members and that his public comments would stir up ethnic hatred.[ citation needed ]
The first court case heard under the new sentencing regime concerned the Ashfield gang rapes of girls by Pakistani and Nepalese immigrants in Ashfield on 28 July 2002.
The attackers used SMS and mobile phones to orchestrate the attack and to phone ahead to other attackers to co-ordinate transport of rape gang members to the locations where women were being held. Authorities later released some of this material, recovered from the rapists' mobile phones.
The attackers texted violent anti-Christian messages, such as, "When you are feeling down... bash a Christian or Catholic and lift up". [34] And as well as sexually degrading texts like, "I've got a slut with me bro, come to Punchbowl". [35]
In July 2019, it was revealed that Joanne Natalie Senior, a former prison psychologist who was fired for having a relationship with a Skaf gang rapist and who married another member of the notorious child rape gang, [36] [37] was working with children as a school counsellor at Malek Fahd Islamic School. [38]
Colin Pitchfork is a British double child-murderer and rapist. He was the first person convicted of rape and murder using DNA profiling after he murdered two girls in neighbouring Leicestershire villages: Lynda Mann in Narborough in November 1983, and Dawn Ashworth in Enderby in July 1986. He was arrested on 19 September 1987 and was sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 January 1988 after pleading guilty to both murders, with the judge giving him a 30-year minimum term.
Bilal Skaf is a serial gang rapist who led groups of Lebanese-Australian men to commit gang rape attacks against women and girls in Sydney in 2000.
Bradley John Murdoch is an Australian criminal serving life imprisonment for the July 2001 murder of English backpacker Peter Falconio in Australia. He will be 74 when eligible for parole in 2032. Murdoch is being held in Darwin Correctional Centre in Darwin, Northern Territory. He has lodged two appeals against his conviction, both of which were unsuccessful. The High Court of Australia refused special leave to appeal on 21 June 2007. He is forbidden to talk to the press.
This is a timeline of major crimes in Australia.
Brian Keith Jones, formerly known as Brendan John Megson and Whispen, is an Australian sex offender who was convicted of the abduction and sexual assault of six male children between 1979 and 1980. Jones was given the nickname Mr Baldy for shaving his victims' hair and dressing them in female clothing during the attacks.
Lawrence Bernard "Larry" Singleton was an American criminal known for perpetrating an infamous rape and mutilation of adolescent hitchhiker Mary Vincent in California in 1978, and then perpetrating a second attack on a woman shortly after being released from prison eight years later. He raped Mary and cut off her forearms, then left her to die in a culvert off Interstate 5 in Del Puerto Canyon. Mary managed to hike to safety and later acted as a critical witness against Singleton. Released from prison on good behavior after serving eight years of his fourteen-year sentence, he later murdered Roxanne Hayes, a mother of three. On February 19, 1997, police found him covered in blood after stabbing her in his new home.
The Lakemba Mosque, also known as the Masjid Ali Bin Abi Talib and officially the Imam Ali bin Abi Taleb Mosque, is Australia's largest mosque. It is located at 71-75 Wangee Road, Lakemba. Owned and managed by the Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA), Lakemba Mosque and the LMA offices are situated contiguously at the same address.
The Ashfield gang rapes was a series of attacks involving indecent assault and rape which were carried out in Ashfield, New South Wales, Australia over a six-month period in 2002. Four Pakistani brothers and a Nepali student were convicted and imprisoned for the rapes.
Malek Fahd Islamic School is a multi-campus independent Islamic co-educational primary and secondary day school, with its main campus located in the south-western Sydney suburb of Greenacre with smaller campuses in Hoxton Park and Beaumont Hills, New South Wales, Australia.
Janine Kerrie Balding was a homicide victim who was abducted, raped and murdered by a homeless gang of five on 8 September 1988, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Balding's murder is often compared to the 1986 murder of Sydney nurse Anita Cobby.
Bilal Saadallah Khazal is a convicted Lebanese Australian criminal who served a custodial sentence of fourteen years, with a non-parole period of nine years, for producing a book whilst knowing it was connected with assisting a terrorist attack. Khazal who was a former baggage handler for Qantas Airways at Sydney Airport, and a prominent figure in the Islamic Youth Movement.
Benny Sela is an Israeli serial rapist.
Antoni Imiela was a German-born convicted serial rapist who grew up in County Durham, England. He was found guilty of the rape of nine women and girls, and the indecent assault, and attempted rape, of a 10-year-old girl whom he repeatedly punched and throttled. The crimes took place in Surrey, Kent, Berkshire, London, Hertfordshire and Birmingham, and the press dubbed the offender the M25 Rapist after the M25 motorway that passes in the vicinity of all those areas except Birmingham. He died in HM Prison Wakefield on 8 March 2018.
The Ripper Crew or the Chicago Rippers was an organized crime group of serial killers, cannibals, rapists, and necrophiles. The group composed of Robin Gecht and three associates: Edward Spreitzer, and brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis. They were suspected in the murders of 17 women in Illinois in 1981 and 1982, as well as the unrelated fatal shooting of a man in a random drive-by shooting. According to one of the detectives who investigated the case, Gecht "made Manson look like a Boy Scout."
The Mount Rennie rape case is the only gang rape in Sydney, Australia during the 1880s that led to a full conviction of the participants involved in the crime—young larrikins of the "Waterloo Push". The attack is sometimes referred to as the "Mount Rennie Outrage" or the "Waterloo Outrage". The crime was a pivotal point in New South Wales history, coming after a history of failure of other gang-rape trials in that time period.
Rotherham shoe rapist is a media epithet given to convicted British serial rapist James Desmond Lloyd from Rotherham, a metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. After attacking his victims, Lloyd stole their footwear and jewellery to keep as trophies. Lloyd was known to be active between 1983 and 1986 when his offending suddenly stopped. He was arrested in 2006 after a familial DNA profile linked him to the crimes. He pleaded guilty to four rapes and two attempted rapes, and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
... jailed for 23 years for his part in the gang rape of two teenage girls.
The State Parole Authority has revoked the parole it granted just yesterday to Skaf gang rapist Mohamed Sanoussi, before he could be released.
On 23 August 2002, Justice Michael Finnane sentenced 'H' to 25 years in gaol with 15 years non-parole. These are Justice Finnane's sentencing remarks.