Bilal Skaf: 15 facts about the crimes that shook Sydney to its core 15 years ago

IT is October 7 at Bondi Beach and two of Bilal Skaf’s gang approach two teenage girls, their next targets. What they don’t know is that police had them under surveillance and were about to swoop.

ON the 15th anniversary of the most unspeakable crimes ever committed in Australia, here’s the definitive must-know fact sheet about the rapes and the ringleader.

1) Bilal Skaf was 18 when he assumed the role of ringleader of a gang of 14 young men who terrorised seven young women across Sydney in 2000, snatching them off the street, luring them off trains and subjecting them to horrific sexual and mental abuse. They would communicate via mobile phone with a typical text message reading “I’ve got a slut, come over bro”.

2) The Skaf gang’s reign of terror began on August 4, just weeks before Sydney was to host the Olympic Games, but the intended 14-year-old victim escaped. She was sitting on a train when she was approached and harassed by the men. She was assaulted, forced to witness one of them fondling himself in front of her and had abuse hurled at her before she broke free and ran to safety at Punchbowl station.

3) The second attack came six days later when two girls, aged 17 and 18, got into a van with some men thinking they would smoke some weed before being dropped home. Instead they would be taken across the Harbour Bridge and out to Greenacre where they would be raped behind a toilet block and bashed in a dimly lit park.

4) On Saturday August 12, a 16-year-old girl was lured to Gosling Park in Greenacre by Mohammed Skaf, Bilal’s younger brother, and a boy who the victim thought was a friend. She was raped by Bilal Skaf as 12 others laughed at her and bashed her before she was able to escape.

Bilal Skaf, left, and younger brother Mohammed.

5) In the most prolonged and vicious attack, another woman was approached by the gang at Bankstown Station and subjected to a horrific six-hour ordeal where she was raped 25 times by a total of 14 gang members before being sprayed with a fire hose and left in the middle of nowhere. The young woman said her attackers had called her an ‘Aussie pig’ and hurled other verbal abuse at her.

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Dimly lit Gosling Park in Greenacre where one of the attacks took place.

6) The final attack again involved two friends who were snatched from Beverley Hills train station in Sydney’s south and taken to a nearby home where they were sexually assaulted over a five hour period. By this time Sydney was gripped with fear as the gang remained at large.

7) The net began to tighten around the gang. On October 7 Mohammed Skaf and Tayyab Skeikh introduce themselves as “Sam” and “Michael” to two 16-year-old girls at Strathfield railway concourse, convincing them to go for a drive. Unaware police are tailing them, the boys make constant mobile calls as they travel to the city’s east.

“Seeing as there’s four of us, let’s all have a gang bang,” Skaf said to the girls. Trusting a survival instinct, the girls leap from the car when it stops in traffic in Paddington.

Undeterred, the boys continue to Bondi Beach where the meet up with the rest of the gang, including Bilal Skaf, Belal Hajeid, Mahmoud Chami and Mohammed Ghanem. The trawl the beach for victims, until police swoop, arresting them in their car.

Under surveillance: The police keeping watch on Mohammed Skaf (left) and other accused members in 2000.

8) When Skaf was finally brought to justice he was sentenced to a maximum sentence of 55 years — the longest non-life sentence ever handed out in NSW. The judge, Michael Finnane told the Daily Telegraph he had initially calculated a sentence of 77 years but reduced it when he realised it was “too extreme”. Skaf would eventually be sentenced to a 28-year maximum sentence on appeal.

9) Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen said while they were in court the accused men laughed and joked, tore up polystyrene cups and threw bits around the courtroom and destroyed their microphones. In the afternoons they fell asleep. All in front of the jury.

10) Despite DNA evidence found at a number of the scenes, Skaf continued to maintain his innocence saying he only had consensual sex. When he was being led out of the courtroom after the guilty verdict he told Finnane “I am not guilty you c*nt”.

Skaf was sentenced to 55 years jail before having that reduced to a maximum of 28 years on appeal.

11) Skaf was originally sent to Long Bay Jail but was transferred after prison authorities became aware of a plot against him. Three inmate were planning to inject the gang rapist with the blood of another prisoner who had HIV. He was packed up and sent to Goulburn’s Supermax.

Robert Black Farmer, who attacked Lauren Huxley, has an ongoing feud with Skaf with both threatening each other regularly.

12) Thing weren’t much better at his new home and Skaf was caught hiding a crowbar in a towel, a weapon he planned to use only for personal protection, he told guards. He was placed in protective custody after it became evident he was a marked man there as well.

13) Skaf has an ongoing feud with Robert Black Farmer, the sadist who brutally bashed Lauren Huxley with a fibro cutter before dousing her with petrol and leaving her to die. The pair have a hatred for each other and regularly threaten to kill the other through the fence in the prison yard that keeps them separated.

Michael Finnane QC, was the judge who presided over Skaf’s trial. He said he had initially come up with a sentence of 77 years but found that was ‘too extreme’. Picture Craig Greenhill

14) Drawings were found in Skaf’s Supermax cell depicting the violent gang-rape of a former girlfriend and the execution of his ex-fiancee by a military-type character who is calling her a “slut”. Prison officers were shocked by the graphic nature of the cartoon-style images.

15) Michael Finnane said that when Bilal Skaf is released from prison “everyone would want to watch out when he is because he will be just as menacing then as he is now.”

Skaf meets with his mother in prison. Picture: Department of Corrective Services.