Four Apex-linked thugs to be booted out of Australia
EXCLUSIVE: FOUR thugs linked to the notorious Apex gang will be kicked out of Australia after their visas were cancelled.
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FOUR thugs linked to the notorious Apex gang will be kicked out of Australia after their visas were cancelled.
Three are from New Zealand and one from Sudan.
One, one of the New Zealanders, has already been deported to that country.
The others will be expelled once they have served prison sentences for crimes including assaults, armed robberies, home invasions and car thefts.
The Herald Sun has been told the four are all at least 18.
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Australian Border Force Commissioner Roman Quaed-vlieg said that his team was working through a Victoria Police list of suspected Apex members “who may be subject to visa cancellation and removal based on criminal or character grounds”.
“We are working closely with Victoria Police … to deal with members of the Apex gang, including cancelling visas for members who engage in gang violence or other criminal activity and removing them from Australia,” Mr Quaed-vlieg said.
And the Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, said: “Federal authorities will do all they can to assist the Victorian police in countering this violent gang.”
The rise of the Apex gang has been a major factor in Victoria’s youth crime crisis.
Young thugs have terrified people in their own homes, and riots have plunged youth detention centres into turmoil.
The first Apex-linked criminal to be deported was Henry Robati, 19, who was sent back to New Zealand last April 11 after his visa was cancelled.
The trio now in custody, who have been told that their visas will be cancelled, are in the process of appealing against those cancellations.
One, Sudanese national Issac Gatkuoth, 19, was sentenced last May to 14 months in a youth detention centre over a drug-fuelled carjacking in Frankston South the previous November.
Gatkuoth — who was then on ice and had not slept for two weeks — was in a stolen BMW that rammed a Ford Falcon XR6 in Cranbourne Rd.
The teen, his face masked by a red bandana, then pointed a sawn-off shotgun at the terrified driver’s head.
The stolen BMW was later involved in a collision that killed mother of two Amanda Matheson.
In court, Gatkuoth denied he had been an Apex member at the time of the Frankston South carjacking.
But prosecutors argued that others who were in the car were Apex gang members, and that Gatkuoth had a long association with the southeastern suburbs gang.
