RAPISTS’ SICK TACTICS: How Skaf gang lured their innocent victims

The Skaf gang used cunning methods to lure young women during a terrifying rampage in southwestern Sydney which changed the city forever.

    Warning – Disturbing Content

    In early August 2000, Sydney was counting down the days to the start of its first Olympic Games, but amid the state of excited anticipation there lurked a malignant force.

    At least six innocent girls aged 16 to 18 were about to fall prey to a series of terrifying and degrading crimes led by a young man motivated by his own twisted need for recognition.

    What happened to these young women at the hands of Bilal Skaf and his degenerate band would cause them such substantial harm that it would leave a scar on Sydney long after its stellar moment as an Olympic city.

    Decent, law-abiding Lebanese Australians would cringe at the loathing reaped by Skaf and his vile cohorts for citizens of their shared background.

    On the day before the first of the Skaf rapes, the gang’s leader was only a few weeks away from his 19th birthday.

    Bilal Skaf was already a significant failure: expelled at 14 without a school certificate, he hadn’t made it as a spray painter, and had been caught and fined for theft, shoplifting and traffic offences.

    He was so dissolute, his own parents Baria and Mustapha sent him back to their home country of Lebanon for some discipline.

    Instead he returned with even more warped ideas about the freedoms enjoyed by Australian females.

    On work days Bilal was an apparently dutiful son, following his father in a career as a State Rail employee that might be dull but had bought the Skafs respect and a house in the suburbs.

    But Bilal was more interested in proving himself as a leader of men who could flout the rules without remorse for the pain and hurt he would wreak on his victims.

    The first attack

    It began on August 4, 2000, when a 14-year-old girl sitting on a train was approached by a group of young men and indecently assaulted while one of the men fondled himself in front of her.

    She was verbally abused but managed to break free when the train pulled into Punchbowl station and escaped further assault.

    Then on August 10, a Thursday, two Year 12 students aged 17 and 18 were at the Chatswood Shopping Centre when they met a group of teenage males including Bilal.

    He introduced himself as “Adam” and pulled a bag of cannabis from his pocket and offered the girls, who would become legally known as Ms A and Ms B, a lift home and a smoke.

    They accepted and travelled with four of the young men including Bilal in a white van, with another four males followed in a red car.

    On the drive over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Bilal asked Ms A to have sex with him but she refused.

    He called the men in the red car and arranged to meet them at McDonalds.

    Instead, the van arrived at Northcote Park, Greenacre, a three minute drive from the Skaf family home.

    Bilal Skaf took Ms A to a park bench and asked her to perform a sex act on him, telling her when she refused to do it before the red car arrived.

    “They are just going to harass you. They won’t leave you alone until you give them what they want,” he said, but again she refused.

    “Do you want to get bashed?”

    Then Bilal said: “If you don’t do it, they will probably bash you for not doing anything.

    “It will be in your best interests if you do it now before they come. I’ll tell them you don’t do anything, and they will leave you alone.”

    Ms A: “Why would they listen to you?”

    Bilal: “Well I’m the oldest and they all respect me … Just do it now and get it over and done with before they come.”

    Ms A submitted but the act was interrupted by the arrival of the red car and Bilal again warned her, “I told you it would happen … do you want to get bashed or not?”

    She was then forced to perform acts on four other men.

    Meanwhile another man slapped Ms B across the face, said “If you don’t do it, worse things will happen to you” and pushed her onto her knees on the ground and forced himself on her.

    Ms B was then stood in front of the park’s toilet block and one after another, six more men forced her to perform acts upon them.

    She was slapped, pushed and sexually assaulted, the two young women subjected to assault by a total of eight males who then fled the park.

    Cruel attack on a 16-year-old “friend”

    Two days later, on Saturday August 12, a 16-year-old girl accepted an offer from Mohammed Skaf to be picked up from her home and driven into the city.

    The girl had known Skaf for some time, although he had never told her his real name and she knew him as “Sam”.

    The girl would later say, “I didn’t think I was in danger, I thought I could trust him.”

    Instead of dropping her in the city, Mohammed took “Ms D” to Gosling Park, Greenacre – a four minute drive from the Skaf residence – where Bilal Skaf and 13 other men lay in wait.

    With the help of some of them, Bilal dragged the screaming girl from the car and raped her as she was being held down.

    A second man held a gun at her head and raped her while Bilal and the twelve others present were “standing around, laughing and talking in their own language”.

    Run for your life

    The second man kicked her in the stomach but the girl, who now feared for her life, mustered enough courage in a single moment when no-one was holding her down, and got up and ran.

    “I just thought if I didn’t run it was just going to keep happening and I may not see my family again,” Miss D later said.

    “I’d talked myself into thinking it was all over and I suppose I just wanted to live and I just wanted to run and I have never run so fast.”

    In February 2001, when the Skaf gang had been arrested and charged and were appearing in Burwood Local Court, the young woman identified Bilal as “Sam’s brother”.

    In a March 2001 police interview, Bilal Skaf refused to answer any questions about the Gosling Park rape, but in a subsequent police interview in April claimed a cousin was the rapist.

    The cousin was taller, different looking from Bilal and did not have the distinguishing mark the girl had identified to police, the scar above Bilal’s left eyebrow.

    Attack number 3 – the six hour ordeal

    The most notorious of the Skaf gang rapes took place on Wednesday, August 30 when a woman boarded a train at Belmore station intending to go to Lidcombe.

    As the 18-year-old, known as Ms C, sat on the train reading her book, The Great Gatsby, five young men approached her in the carriage.

    They were Mohammed Skaf, brothers Mohammed and Mahmoud Sanoussi and a young man who would later be identified as “H” because although he was 19, he had an intellectual disability.

    It was about 3.30pm and Skaf and his friends suggested she join them at another location to smoke some cannabis.

    Ms C agreed and the group alighted at Bankstown station, and went to the adjacent Marion Street car park.

    Mohammed Skaf, having earlier taken her mobile phone, lured Ms C into one of the toilets on the premise of smoking the joint, then detained her there and raped her.

    Ms C was then subjected to a series of sexual assaults in the toilet by the males she had met on the train, other than H.

    Eventually she was able to leave the toilet and Ms C entered a black car that contained two previously unencountered males plus H.

    “Move bitch and you’re dead”

    She thought she was going to be taken to the police but was driven to the Bankstown Trotting Club where H committed a sexual assault on Ms C near a shed.

    Then Ms C was instructed to get into a red car with several males and told, “You’re going with these guys. They’re going to take you home.”

    Ms C was seated in the back of the car between Bilal Skaf and another man.

    During the course of the drive she was sexually and indecently assaulted and forced to commit acts upon males.

    The car was driven to a townhouse complex and then to a service station and subsequently to an industrial estate in Chullora.

    When the vehicle stopped at the service station, the driver, Mahmoud Chami, took from the glove box what Ms C believed to be a weapon, held it to her head and said, “Don’t move bitch, or you’re dead.”

    At the industrial estate, Chami sexually assaulted her while Bilal Skaf and another male kept the car’s doors closed.

    “Aussie pig”

    Then others including Bilal sexually assaulted Ms C, calling her an “Aussie Pig”, and asking her if “Leb ck tasted better than Aussie ck”.

    She heard mobile phones ringing and conversations between the men and was told she would be raped “Leb-style”.

    It was later revealed that the gang would also communicate via text, with the message, when they had secured a victim, reading something like “I’ve got a slut, come over bro”.

    Around this time, she saw a black car arrive containing four males including Mohammed Skaf, who sexually assaulted her.

    In a final degrading act, she was hosed down by the attackers.

    Raped 25 times by 14 men

    Ms C had been sexually assaulted by 14 men and raped 25 times.

    She later told her story to 60 Minutes and said she had to choose between enduring the rapes or potentially being killed.

    “I just can’t believe they had no pity whatsoever. They didn’t think of me as a person, they just thought of me as some thing, just rubbish or meat or something,” she said.

    “I was scared that if I angered … or annoyed these people they were going to hurt me.

    “There was a point when one of them held a gun to my head and that’s when I had to ask myself whether it was worth fighting and dying or … not fighting.

    “I knew that I had to live. I couldn’t stand the thought of my mum and everyone I love not knowing what had happened to me if I turned up dead that night.”

    Final attack

    By Monday September 4, Sydney was gripped with Olympic fever with athletes and media flying in and just eleven days until the opening ceremony.

    Women had been warned that an attacker known as the Westmead rapist, who had been assaulting women in Parramatta since 1998 was again on the prowl.

    Then two 16-year-old girls were taken from Beverly Hills railway station to a house two suburbs away, where three men repeatedly raped them over a period of five hours.

    One of the victims was told that “You deserve it because you’re an Australian”.

    Two days before the Sydney Olympics opened, NSW Police warned women in southwestern Sydney not to travel alone “after a spate of gang rapes in recent months”.
    Strike Force Sayda had been formed and was investigating the attacks which took place after women “were approached by males at railway stations”.

    The women often accepted “a lift or were forced into a car” and taken to a house or park and raped.

    Stories in the media reported that one of the victims had been told “they deserve what they get because they are ‘Aussie’.”

    Closing in

    SF Sayda had charged several young men “of Middle Eastern extraction” in connection with the rapes and conducted DNA tests.

    The net was beginning to tighten around the gang, but police were still seeking a dozen more men and were worried further attacks would occur.

    Detectives began surveillance of the Skaf brothers and other suspected gang members.

    On October 7, Mohammed Skaf and Tayyab Sheikh introduced themselves as “Sam” and “Michael” to two 16-year-old girls at Strathfield railway concourse.

    They convinced the girls to go for a drive to Bondi Beach and, with police tailing them, the pair drove to the city’s ea st, making constant mobile phone calls along the way.

    En route, Mohammed Skaf said to the girls: “Seeing as there’s four of us, let’s all have a gang bang”.

    14-year-old’s escape
    When the car stopped in traffic in Paddington, the girls leapt out and ran off.

    Skaf and Sheikh continued on to Bondi Beach where they met up with the rest of the gang, including Bilal Skaf, Belal Hajeid, Mahmoud Chami and Mohammed Ghanem.

    They trawled the beach for victims, until police swooped, arresting them.

    Only nine of the 14 in the gang would be brought to justice, with Bilal Skaf earning the longest sentence, of 55 years, which would be reduced to 28 on appeal.

    Bilal Skaf refused to testify after the initial hearing, and continue to maintain he had only consensual sex.

    His contempt for women and the system endured through his trials, sentencing and his time in prison.

    During the trials, the accused men joked and laughed, tore up polystyrene cups and threw bits around the courtroom, fell asleep and mouthed messages to their relatives in attendance.

    One female relative of one of the defendants called Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen a “sharmootah”, which is Arabic for the word “sl*t”, during the trial.

    candace.sutton@news.com.au

    Read related topics: Sydney

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