Teens who scrawled ’IS’ in Caltex murder jailed for decades

Two teenagers who embarked on a “violent and uncontrolled criminal rampage’, killing a defenceless service station worker and scrawling ‘IS’ in his blood have been jailed for decades.

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Two teenage degenerates will serve decades behind bars after they viciously murdered a Queanbeyan service station worker and, in “macabre and callous in the extreme” finale, scrawled a terrorist message in his blood.

DM was just 16 when he and 15-year-old accomplice DS meandered around Queanbeyan with a group of other local kids pondering break and enters to buy drugs in April 2017.

The older boy told one 13-year-old girl to put a knife in her backpack and said he’d joined the Islamic State terror group.

He even showed pictures of a man holding a severed head and text messages, he said, between him and the executioner.

Caltex services station in Queanbeyan, NSW where 29-year-old Zeeshan Akbar was killed.

DM was fascinated by the terror group, uploading photos of their violence and their black flag on social media.

He was carrying a knife in his pants — they tried to mug a bottle shop employee, punching him in the face before running.

The group, which was dwindling in numbers through the night, approached a man on a park bench and asked for smokes and the man’s longneck.

When he only offered DM a sip, the teenager smashed the bottle over his face and they fled again. They went to a mate’s house and DM tried to rob the man at knifepoint – they grappled and the man was struck with a wheel brace.

Zeeshan Akbarw was a Pakastani student who came to Australia in search of a better life.

Just before midnight DS and DM were the last two of the group standing.

The drug-addled teens had come from difficult homes with jailbird fathers, and both boys had turned to alcohol, weed and meth by the time they were 12.

Just before midnight they approached lone worker Zeeshan Akbar, 29, who was standing outside the Caltex where he worked.

Mr Akbar swiped his access card and they entered the servo.

DM wasted no time — he would tell psychologists a voice in his head was chanting “kill him, kill him, kill him”.

He plunged a knife into the innocent man’s back – NSW Supreme Court Justice Geoffrey Bellew called it “unmitigated cowardice”.

“There was nobody who could come to his assistance, he was in a position of complete vulnerability,” Justice Bellew said sentencing the pair on Friday.

Forensic officers at the crime scene where “IS” was written with blood on a wall.

Even as Mr Akbar tried to pull himself away DM threw an arm around his neck and kept stabbing over and over, slicing his victim’s hands and stabbing into his vital organs.

“He was overpowered by DM who, in an uncontrolled and ferocious display of gratuitous violence, inflicted two further blows with the knife,” the judge said.

One blow was through Mr Akbar’s heart, the second into a vital artery.

DS was watching, making no effort to stop his murderous accomplice, and tried instead to break into the cash register.

As Mr Akbar lay bleeding out on the floor, DM dipped his finger in the blood and wrote “IS” on a window.

The pair then smashed their way out of the locked doors, leaving Mr Akbar to die.

The pair fled the grisly scene before flagging down passing motorist Sankalpa Mahatara.

The older boy stabbed Mr Mahatara in the chest before the teens left with his car.

They would be pulled over on an ACT highway by police.

“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, I’m going to cut your heads off,” DM screamed at police as they arrested him.

“There is only one God.”

A woman lays flowers at a Caltex services station in Queanbeyan, where a man was fatality stabbed. Picture Kym Smith

The teenager, who would later score 36/40 on a psychopathy test, would call out from the police cells “I’m going to do 50 years, I’m a f***ing murderer”.

This time he didn’t have any blood to repeat his grim calling card — so he scrawled “IS” on the cell wall in tomato sauce.

They would both avoid trial with last minute guilty pleas late last year.

Justice Bellew, on Friday, read a letter from DM to the families of his victims in which he said he was wracked with guilt.

But psychologists concluded his litany of mental health disorders, including schizophrenia, and generally low-powered brain, meant he was susceptible to extremist ideologies.

The judge handed down significant sentences for the harrowing “criminal rampage”.

DS was given a maximum term of 18 years and four months to be eligible for parole in January 2031.

DM was handed a maximum or 35 years and six months, he will be eligible for parole in October 2044.

The pair showed no emotion as their sentences were meted out.