Sins of the brothers: How Skaf rapists shocking acts continued behind bars
The vile behaviour of the Skaf brother rapists did not stop when they were jailed, as can be revealed in their shocking prison files and Bilal’s sordid jail art.
As Mohammed Skaf prepares to walk out of prison 21 years after the despicable gang rapes of the gang that bears his name, he and brother Bilal Skaf’s shocking jail records can be revealed.
Being locked up behind bars did not stop the Skaf brothers’ appalling behaviour and attitude towards women characterised by the degrading and humiliating rapes by their gang.
Since they were locked up in late 2000, the Skaf brothers have shown scant regard for authority or a willingness to rehabilitate or show remorse for their crimes.
While still a minor in the Kariong Juvenile detention facility, Mohammed Skaf made sexually brazen remarks to female staff and would claim his victims were willing participants.
But it was his brother Bilal’s behaviour early on in his lengthy prison sentence that alarmed the most hardened of prison guards.
The shocking chain of events goes back to September 2002, as Bilal had marked his 21st birthday behind bars with the passing of his 55 year prison sentence.
At the time, his “heartbroken” fiancee said the convicted rapist was “hanging on” for the appeal she knew would secure his release.
“I’m out here waiting for him. That’s holding him up. He has me and a life out here. If we can get through this, we can get through anything – God willing,” she said.
The 20-year-old insurance consultant had become engaged to Skaf in November 2000 before his arrest for the rapes and still wanted to share the rest of her life with him.
Even after hearing the allegations of the rape gang’s crimes, she was planning a honeymoon on “Temptation Island” (or the Hawaiian resort location of the reality TV show) and the name of their future daughter, Isabella.
She had sat through Bilal’s trial, heard the terrible evidence and refused to accept the jury’s guilty verdict, saying she believed “he didn’t force girls to have sex”.
At that point, she agreed with the Skaf brothers that the complainants – six severely traumatised women rape victims aged 16 to 18 years old – were somehow complicit or willing victims.
A month earlier, Skaf had been moved from Sydney’s Long Bay prison after fellow inmates threatened to inject him with HIV-infected blood taken from another prisoner.
He was at first moved to Goulburn’s Multi Purpose Unit (MPU) known as “the Bronx” or “baby Supermax” for its placement of risky or at-risk prisoners.
But at the MPU, Skaf was later discovered to have a stack of hardcore pornography in his cell.
Extremely explicit magazines, which even astonished officers used to some “soft porn” entering the system, had somehow made their way through the mail screening system.
Skaf was sent to Goulburn’s Supermax, the “jail within the jail” and confined in Cell No. 1 of the probationary wing, 7 Unit.
He was getting deeper into the system by his own misbehaviour, but on the outside his fiancee and his parents still believed in his innocence.
His mother Baria – who the same month would be banned from visiting her sons in prison – produced a photo of the engaged couple at her Greenacre home, saying, “There, does he look like a monster?”
On the back of the photo, the fiancee had written to Bilal: “I love you babe, remember that! I’m thinking about you right now whilst you’re reading this.
“Please take care and hang in there, ‘cause remember who loves you.”
The next month, inside Cell No. 1, Bilal used a plastic dinner knife to carve the young woman’s name into his right arm, and the shortened version of her first name into his left arm.
His arms became infected and he received a disciplinary reprimand from officers to whom he boasted he could bear the pain because of his undying love for her.
He said the ugly wounds would look “heaps better” when they healed and would remind him of her until his release when he would marry her.
But all that was about to change, as the woman began to realise that she had been wrong about Skaf, and that he was truly guilty of his heinous acts against the young women.
On December 4, 2002, a letter containing white powder addressed to then NSW Corrective Services Commissioner Ron Woodham was found at Supermax.
The anthrax hoax – in which a powder purporting to contain the deadly bacterium is used as a biological weapon threat – was immediately suspected to have been from Skaf.
By early 2003, the rapist’s fiancee had decided her engagement to Skaf was over and in March she told him she didn’t want to see him again.
Skaf began making threatening phone calls to the woman and to her family members.
The same month, prison authorities charged Skaf with sending the anthrax hoax to Woodham, and he began sending his fiancee hateful letters.
Then in July 2003, a Supermax prison officer searching Skaf’s cell found a cache of cartoon drawings of such violence and sexual depravity that even he was “appalled and horrified” by.
Skaf had hand-drawn five cartoons with his fiancee as the featured female figure.
In one, an armed soldier is firing bullets into a woman at point-blank range.
Blood is dripping from her wounds, seven spent shells are on the ground beside her body and the soldier is standing over her saying “Ya sl*t”.
In another she is being gang-raped, with one of the accomplices saying to the rapist: “Hurry up man there’s 50 others waiting.”
Mr Woodham said the pictures were the first he had seen drawn by a convicted rapist that encouraged rape.
“I believe the drawings depict the way he thinks,” Mr Woodham said at the time.
“It tells you the way he thinks about women. He hasn’t shown remorse at all.
On learning about the vile drawings, the young woman told this reporter she felt duped and foolish for believing Skaf’s protestations of innocence.
She described how his recent harassment had upset her family.
“I can’t believe it is happening,” she said. “He’s a piece of sh*t. I couldn’t care less about him.
“He can rot in hell.”
The woman now believed what the Skaf brothers’ trial had ultimately found: that the Skaf gang raped and humiliated six girls, calling one of them an “Aussie Pig” and asking her if “Leb c**k tasted better than Aussie c**k”.
The trial judge Michael Finnane said that when Bilal Skaf was eventually released from prison, “everyone would want to watch out when he is because he will be just as menacing then as he is now”.
He called Mohammed Skaf “a vicious, cowardly bully, arrogant and a liar, as well as being a rapist”.
While at Supermax, Bilal Skaf was caught hiding a crowbar in a towel, a weapon he planned to use only for personal protection, he told guards.
In late 2004, Baria Skaf was allowed to re-enter NSW prisons after the expiry of her ban stemming from when she was caught on Supermax CCTV on September 7, 2002.
Seated in the visits room with husband Mustapha and son Bilal, who was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, Baria Skaf could be seen removing papers from the visits table and putting them into her sock.
The seven pages she secretly had contained drawings of his cell and exercise areas at Supermax which were deemed security sensitive.
Around the same time, Mustapha Skaf was briefly banned for an alleged attempt to bribe an officer to put his telephone call through to Bilal, an accusation which was dismissed.
After Bilal Skaf was moved from Supermax and Mohammed Skaf graduated from juvenile prison to the adult system, the brothers were placed in a shared cell.
Mohammed had also shown no remorse for his part in the crimes, which included him luring a 16-year-old girl who believed Mohammed was her friend to Gosling Park, Greenacre.
There she was raped by Bilal and another gang member while 12 males stood around, watching and laughing.
In adult prison, Mohammed continued to blame the young women and say they weren’t victims, claiming “they came out with us as soon as I asked them”.
In 2006, Bilal Skaf’s sentence was reduced on appeal to a minimum of 32 years non-parole and a maximum of 38.
Mohammed Skaf’s original sentence of 31 years was reduced on appeal to 23 years.
In September 2008, a friend of Mohammed tried to smuggle in a mobile phone hidden in a stack of photocopier paper for him at Goulburn jail.
Bilal Skaf was in and out of segregation cells at Goulburn prison.
Despite his outward bravado, Skaf often sobbed in his cell and had attempted self harm.
At Goulburn, he begged to be taken out of segregation and placed in the “Leb Yard”, one of the caged pens of Goulburn main prison’s circle of yards which houses mostly inmates of Middle Eastern origin.
“They love me,” he reportedly told officers, “I’m their hero, I’m famous. They love what I did to those Aussie scum.”
Bilal had an ongoing prison feud with Robert Black Farmer.
Farmer is the sadist serving 20 years for the 2005 brutal attack with a fibro cutter on 18-year-old Lauren Huxley, who was doused with petrol and left to die.
The pair have their prison papers marked with non-association warnings after they regularly threatened to kill one other through a prison yard fence at Goulburn.
The two Skaf brothers lived together in a cell for some time and committed misdemeanours in jail which showed they were thumbing their noses at the system.
But then they were caught after smuggling in contraband, in the form of two mobile phones which they then hid in a steel cabinet they had prised apart.
The brothers had somehow “drilled” out the cabinet’s rivets and popped out the metal sheet from its bottom, hiding the phones in the frame before placing the metal skin back over it.
Discovered on May 28, 2009, the brothers were stripsearched and moved into segregation cells for up to three months.
Then aged 27 and 26, Bilal remained in Goulburn and Mohammed was moved to Lithgow.
Mr Woodham vowed that while inside his prison system the brothers would “never be together again. Never”.
In 2015, Bilal Skaf was assaulted by three other inmates in the yard at Goulburn prison and sustained minor head injuries.
Mohammed was moved to progressively lower security prisons as his minimum 18 year sentence expired and he moved closer to his release date.
Most recently he has been housed at Kirkconnell Correctional Centre between Lithgow and Bathurst prisons, and will be released on parole to live with his parents in the coming week.
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