Skaf gang rapes: 15 facts about the crimes that shook Sydney to its core
It’s October 7 at Bondi Beach and two of Bilal Skaf’s gang approach their next targets. What they don’t know is that police had them under surveillance and were about to swoop.
Police & Courts
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More than two decades after some 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 set 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.
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 40 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.
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) On October 7 Mohammed Skaf and Tayyab Skeikh introduced themselves as “Sam” and “Michael” to two 16-year-old girls at the Strathfield railway concourse, convincing them to go for a drive. Unaware police were tailing them, the boys mad constant mobile calls as they travelled 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 stopped in traffic in Paddington.
8) When Bilal 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. Mohammed Skaf was originally jailed for 32 years but after appeals and a further trial, his sentence ended up at 23 years with a 17 year non-parole period. It ends on January 1, 2024.
9) Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC 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. The judge described Mohammed as a “vicious cowardly bully, arrogant and a liar as well as being a rapist”.
10) Despite DNA evidence found at a number of the scenes, Bilal 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**t”. Mohammed maintained he had been in Canberra at the time despite CCTV footage clearly showing him at Bankstown Railway Station. He tried to claim it was his cousin.
12) Thing weren’t much better at his new home and Bilal 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. The Skaf brothers shared a cell for some time until they were caught smuggling in two mobile phones which they hid in a steel cabinet they had prised apart.
13) Bilal 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. Bilal and Farmer have had a jatred for each other and regularly threatened to kill each other through the fence in the prison yard that separated them.
14) Drawings were found in Bilal 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.” The former judge said of Mohammed that he was concerned Mohammed would be a continuing threat but that he had to get out one day.Most recently he had been held at Kirkconnell Correctional Centre between Lithgow and Bathurst.
This article was first published in 2015
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