This large group of men got out of this van. Both Mohammed Skaf and the victim went and saw her mother and got her consent as the trip was going to be on a Saturday night. J., Noble, G. Poynting, S. and Tabar, P. (2000) Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime. They also robbed the girls. Subsequent migration was steady until an influx occurred surrounding the Arab . There was also evidence that each of the accused and the men in the red van abused the girls, calling them 'sluts' and threatened retribution on them if either of them had VD or AIDS. Australian Lebanese families. Australian police have arrested more than 200 people involved in organised crime after infiltrating an encrypted messaging app that opened up nearly 25 million messages about "industrial-scale". The press was also prevented from providing any likenesses or descriptions of the accused or their racial origins. Home News Video- A crime shocked the Lebanese in Australia.. New facts about the murder of Abboud Yazbek. Lebanese organized crime is active in the country of Lebanon itself, as well as in countries and areas with a large Arab community, most notably United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and in the Triple Frontier in South America. The geographic heartland of Australias 100,000-strong Lebanese community, its red brick apartments and cement-sheet homes are peppered with mosques, musallas and churches. world News, Hosted byByohostingMost Recommended Web Hosting for complains, abuse, advertising contact:o f f i c e @byohosting.com, Video- A crime shocked the Lebanese in Australia.. New facts about the murder of Abboud Yazbek, Two-season contract: Xavier Simoneau could become the Canadians next little plague, Irma Serrano, La Tigresa, dies at the age of 89, reports the Association of Interpreters of Mexico. One of the dead was Sarkis Abboud, 61 years old, and the second was his friend, Tony Yazbek, two years younger. America All rights reserved. This was a criminal conspiracy involving two groups of men, that was carefully coordinated by mobile phones. It was about 9pm at this stage. Then another car arrived with the offenders Chami and two other men, one man known as Nike Sam. He put to me in submissions that the offences had taken place over a twenty-day period and I should impose a sentence that ensured his client spent no more than twenty years in jail. . My sentence on him was substantially reduced by the Court of Criminal Appeal, which also reduced the sentences on some of the others involved, but not all of them. Yet, the new gangland war fails to capture the imagination. Australia enjoys friendly bilateral relations with Lebanon, underpinned by strong people-to-people links. In the third trial, the accused were Bilal Skaf, Mohammed Skaf, Mohammed Ghanem and Mahmoud Chami. His co-accused on the other hand, were quiet and restrained in their manner. Collins, J. You just want more, Basha says. The first community of Lebanese in Australia were Maronite Christians, quickly followed by a large Muslim community. There was no application that I should do otherwise. As the French president Emmanuel Macron toured the devastated scenes in Beirut on Thursday, a Lebanese woman could be heard urging the president to not give money to the corrupt government. Macron replied, I guarantee you, this aid will not go to corrupt hands.. Counsel for each of the other accused addressed the jury then. He extended his criminal activities and eventually became known as "the Lebanese . It is a crime that assaults human dignity. 11:06 EST 27 May 2018 It is often difficult to predict whether there will be rehabilitation. She was able to identify Bilal Skaf because he made a point of shoving his face close to hers and saying, 'I'm Sam's brother, Sam.'. From 1880 to the 1920s, mainly Maronite, Melkite and Orthodox Christians arrived on a small scale. Unwelcome at school, too much discipline at home, so where do these teenagers go to find respect? Trad asks. Within these neighbourhoods lies the ravaged home of award-winning Lebanese-Australian journalist Rania Abouzeid. Sports Instead of taking her to the Harbour Bridge, Mohammed Skaf drove her to a park in Greenacre. New South Wales (NSW) state police have arrested 31 people, including three teenagers, after a turf war between two prominent drug gangs [File: David Gray/Reuters] By Ian Lloyd Neubauer. , updated My views on sentence were not those of the judges of the Court of Criminal Appeal, but their sentences prevail. investment Corona This was evidence of incriminating phone calls between him and Chami. I wont be packing up., For Melki, staying in Lebanon isnt simply about a place of residence, its about justice. Hamzy, 44, was gunned down in the . Latest news Since then, migration has significantly reduced and growth rates have become steady. But to this day Finnane is regularly asked about the Skaf case, sometimes by strangers, at social functions and on other unexpected occasions.
', Then Labor premier Bob Carr has said of the original 55-year sentence: 'It was certainly a headline grabber, it met community expectations, it sent a powerful message to any punk with violent tendencies on the margins of gang activity that this was very dangerous behaviour.'. That is not the law. Pluto Press, Annandale NSW. Each of them also denied agreeing at any time, in the van or in the park, to oral sex with these men and the men in the red van. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has said the government of Malcolm Fraser made a mistake in bringing Lebanese refugees to Australia in the 1970s, saying they formed a majority of . I was always hopeful that the people I sentenced in other cases might see the point of rehabilitation and, undoubtedly, some of them did. USA In Germany these clans mostly settled in Berlin, Bremen and Essen where they became involved in narcotics trafficking, weapons trafficking, extortion, prostitution, illegal gambling, car theft, money laundering and armed robbery. The girls in the car were very concerned at this point, but too scared to get out and run away. There were other standard instructions thenthe trial began. For example, I had to explain that sexual intercourse was not, as many people might think, only penetration of the vagina of a woman by the penis of a man, but extended to penetration of any part of the body of a person by any part of the body of another. Bilal Skaf did most of the talking to the girls and called himself 'Adam'. Bilal Skaf was one of the people who then approached the victim whom he grabbed by the hair. News Agency Indictable offenses are heard in a superior court in the presences of a jury. Skaf and the members of this gang clearly wanted public recognition for what they had done. At first they resisted, but we made them believe that respect is something every child deserves, but that they needed to take action to earn that respect, he says. Indeed, when he was being taken away after I imposed sentence on him, he turned to me and said, 'And I am innocent, you c***t!' If you ever hear him speak, you would never believe it. Koreans, growing numbers of Indians, and on the Lakemba side lots of Lebanese and other Arabs. Michael Finnane, the judge who imposed that record sentence - which was later reduced after several appeals - was widely celebrated for his stance at the time. Praying for the injured, missing & dead, she wrote on Twitter. 'Each sentence was framed so that there could be some hope of release but, in my mind, the protection of the community was more important than early release. The people in the white van went through the city and stopped at a McDonald's in Stanmore. During her ordeal the woman was called an 'Aussie pig', told she was going to get it 'Leb-style' and asked if 'Leb c*** tasted better than Aussie c***'. He later pleaded guilty to some of the offences and when he did, I directed that he not be identified by his name. However, although these cases attracted some media attention while the trials were proceeding, they passed largely with little comment.'. The Ryan-inspired OCR had just six crimes. Bilal Skaf, however, elected to give evidence. trot Manorama Online I gave that consent. There were others who have never been brought to trial. 'One thing was obvious to me - Bilal Skaf wanted the victims to talk about what happened, to pass on their terror. The victim was taken from the station area and forced into public toilets where four men in this group sexually assaulted her, with one of them assaulting her twice.
I will clean up, I will repair what I can repair, and then Ill live there. I do not believe he will ever acknowledge the seriousness of what he did. That sentence was modified several times upon appeal. I merely imposed sentences on a number of offenders. In the 1980s . His demeanour in the court room said that. Bilal Skaf was the eldest and was about 21 years of age. However, the victims' descriptions of the other men who attacked them were quite vague, as could be expected. Stephen Gibbs for Daily Mail Australia. Australia Arab organized crime was introduced in Australia after the mass immigration of Arab people after the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s to the end of the 1980s. When they got into the white van, the two girls discovered the presence of the other two men. Many among Australia's Lebanese community trace their families' arrival back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the number of Lebanese-born residents tripled to 33,424. This trial concerned violent sexual assaults on a young woman of 18 who was travelling home by train on an afternoon on 30 August 2000. It came as a surprise to me that nothing was going to be presented to me by counsel for Bilal Skaf. 4. If the Crown proved to the satisfaction of the jury and beyond reasonable doubt that it was done without consent, then the Crown case on that charge was established. The law provides that a discount of up to 25 per cent is appropriate to be given if the plea of guilty is given at an early time. After they were raped, the victims were just abandoned. She does not have to fight to the death to protect herself from sexual assault. Skaf did all the talking and suggested a trip in a car and puffing some marijuana. If I opened up my lunchbox and pulled out a Lebanese roll, I would get hassled. The gang assaulted the two girls, by punching and kicking them and, of course, by dragging them across a park by the neck. He also clicked his fingers towards my court officers, ordering them to get him water. [6] These criminal organizations are mostly based around extended criminal clans. It was because the police had given up fighting back. There were a series of instances of forced oral intercourse by each of the accused men and H, as well as Y and the men in the red van. Those involved in these crimes committed them between 10 August and 30 August 2000 on three separate occasions. Look what happened in Germany in the 1940s., Selda Dagistanli, a lecturer in criminology at the University of Western Sydney, agrees that, When you attach criminal behavior to ethnicity, thats racist, and it makes you question the motivation of the people saying it., New South WalesPolice Deputy Commissioner Nick Kaldas says the problem in Bankstown and other parts of southwestern Sydney is not as bad as it seems. With Covid-19 restrictions preventing Lebanese Australians from holding in-person activities, such as fundraising events and protests, local activists like Maakasa are relying on Instagram and Facebook to generate support. Our initial goal was 10,000. But the central bank, Banque du Liban, led by former Merrill Lynch banker Riad Salameh . Worldwide pandemic lockdowns have only made it easier for Lebanese expats to coordinate. Diaspora aid to Lebanon is meticulously processed to avoid funds falling into the hands of government officials and intermediaries accused of corruption, with support being sent directly to vetted NGOs, such as the Lebanese Red Cross. They were classified as a Turk due to Lebanon being a province of the Ottoman Empire at that time. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. The trial was quite tense. A number of family members of the gang members, other than the Skafs, gave evidence and it seemed to me that they were decent, honourable people, who were troubled about the criminal involvement of these young men. They could not suggest the girls consented to sexual intercourse because they claimed not to have been there. God damn, you see one blonde person from Turkey or Lebanon and you think that there's pure whites in that country. The local people were all blown up and the tragic end was released | International | Sanli News Network SETN.COM, Eleven-year-old Georgia wins on The Voice Kids. He did not believe he would be caught. I cannot say what will happen to these men. Skaf clearly was the leader. The improvement was remarkable Imagine what they would be capable of if they had a better start in life., PHOTOS:Wildfires Scorch Australia As Temperatures Reach Record Highs. technology Id punch any Aussie kid who even looked at me., (MORE:Circle Sentencing: Alternative Justice in Australia). In the face of such catastrophic ruin, the only option local residents had was to help. Thus, the Crown Prosecutor and the counsel for Hajeid and Ghanem joined forces to attack Bilal Skaf. With all of us getting used to working on Zoom and Slack, its become easier to work with people from different cities.. At the time, Mohammed Skaf was still a schoolboy and attended the same school as the victim, to whom he was known as 'Sam'. Shimbiris VIP What is still difficult for me to understand is why this serious criminal conspiracy involving so many young men was launched. 'What the Skaf gang did was to enable multiple men to defile and degrade four young women. 5 Brian Lipscomb If these men, who are all still young, take notice of their brothers, sisters and cousins, they will settle down to a normal life and the criminal justice system will not see them again. But these days its worse. Why did those who joined him, become involved? They were followed by other groups of criminals of Lebanese descent, many of whom, in contrast to their predecessors, preferred to remain in the part of Sydney where Keep Reading Tri Minh Tran The first found that Middle-Eastern Australians reported more discrimination compared with non-Middle-Eastern Australians. I came to my apartment to see the damage. Perhaps the offenders did not believe any of the victims would ever tell the police. Once you got into the zone where you are powerful and people are scared of you, you dont want to stop. My apartment, like others close to the blast, is . The main center of Arab organized crime is Sydney, with a significant community of 120,000, followed by Melbourne. She was also raped vaginally by another man who also forced oral sex on her. Lebanese migration to Australia occurred in the three main waves. From the outset, the City of Bankstown in south-western Sydneys sprawling migrant belt is a picture of multiculturalism. Ukraine Life cannot. UAE When the verdicts came in after the conclusion of this trial, I informed counsel that I would not sentence their clients until all trials concerning them had concluded. Lebanese Crime, Official Cowardice In Australia. Skaf used condoms and threw them on the ground. #23. 'What caused the unprecedented public interest in the Skaf trials, what set them apart from all other sexual assault trials, was the repeated attacks in a short time frame by a gang with a carefully planned strategy,' Finnane writes. Each girl denied this and gave evidence that Skaf, and those with him in the white van, persistently put pressure on them to engage in oral sex in the van on the way to Greenacre. What we found was that in a matter of weeks they were excelling the other kids in school. A former minister once asked me, hasnt the Australian embassy got a little aid budget? I asked what for, he said he wanted to put new street lighting on his street. Bartlem says that request was one of many, which included a Lebanese politician seeking all-expense-paid trips to Australia. A Year Later, Unanswered Questions and Bad Blood, The Nanjing Massacre: Scenes from a Hideous Slaughter 75 Years Ago, Blood Money: Tsunami Recovery Funds Go to Japans Whaling Industry. Russia The following is an edited extract of The Pursuit of Justice by Michael Finnane, QC: All three accused were Australian citizens whose parents had come from Lebanon. My understanding was that the relevant agencies would report back to Australia, either through our UN office in Geneva or New York, how they spent that money, and the government would see that as being accountable to the Australian taxpayer, he says. However, Bilal Skaf and the other actual rapist had never met her before. The earth-shattering explosion, caused by the unsafe storage of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate at Beiruts port, damaged every part of the city of 2 million people. Not one of them showed that fear of criminal proceedings or of jail was ever in their minds. Of these, 52.5 per cent were males and 47.5 per cent were females. The first occurred from 1880 to 1947 when many Maronite, Melkite and Orthodox Christians migrated. It was important that I told the jury this because each of the girls had certainly agreed to get in the white van. A mobile phone was then used by someone in this group to secure the attendance of another group who arrived in a car. These are questions that will probably never be answered. However, the website of the Voice of Lebanon radio station in Melbourne, mentioned important information, accompanied by two pictures of the dead, and a summary of the information that the offender was a friend of the assassinated Tony Yazbek and she has a 10-year-old daughter, who lives with her mothers grandmother, and that the late Sarkis Abboud was a victim of his presence with his friend. At that time, according to the radio. They were an attack on society, but why? RELATED: Manhunt under way after shooting in Sydney suburb. As for their killing, the police learned about it from citizens who told them that they had found Aboud quarreling in a side road in one of the citys suburbs. The former ambassador is no stranger to Lebanese corruption, having fielded astonishing requests from Lebanese officials in his time there seeking Australian aid money for self-fulfilling purposes. COVID-19 Present governor of the State of NSW is a distinguished Lebanese-Christian woman. This then meant there was not sufficient evidence against him of identification. However, these crimes were of secondary importance. Now retired from the District Court and back in private practice, Finnane has written about this terrible chapter in the country's criminal annals in a memoir about his life on the bench and at the bar. [2], Arab organized crime was introduced in Australia after the mass immigration of Arab people after the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s to the end of the 1980s. For most of his career, Finnane was not well known outside legal circles but that changed rapidly and forever when he presided over the Skaf rape trials. Each of Ghanem and Hajeid's counsel put forward arguments that they had not been properly identified and were not present. The commission of a crime that shocked the Lebanese, who numbered 70 to 90,000 between expatriates and descendants in the city. They found him dead in his apartment in a building in the same area, while Abboud died in an ambulance while she was transporting him to Nearby hospital. The Ones That Didnt Make It: Australia-Bound Refugees Languish in Indonesia, Circle Sentencing: Alternative Justice in Australia, Wildfires Scorch Australia As Temperatures Reach Record Highs, Nelson Mandelas Extraordinary Life: An Interactive Timeline, How Did Gaddafi Die? Men of Middle Eastern appearance banteramicably in Arabic within tea rooms and coffee shops, while women wearing headscarves, hijabs and, on the odd occasion, burqas wheel prams through Centro, Bankstowns sparkling white shopping center. There was another man, later identified as Y, who took part in the events on this night. And given the history of government efforts to obtain information on race, Im not even sure its something we should be doing. Mobile phone technology was used on each occasion to coordinate the attacks, which were well planned and carried out with determination by young men, one as young as fourteen, the oldest being Bilal Skaf at twenty-one years of age. While Finnane's sentencing of the Skaf gang members was widely lauded and drew praise from many politicians, he was criticised privately by some other judges. For the past decades the Arab crime families had controlled 78% of Germany's underworld activities. A number of the men penetrated her vagina with their fingers. Many months later he pleaded guilty to a series of sexual offences that included the events of this night. business We are no longer accepting comments on this article. The Pursuit of Justice, published by New Holland Publishers, RRP $35, is available from all good book retailers or online at New Holland Publishers. Social media has been very important pages connected to diaspora networks create a ripple effect, which helps spread the word and mobilise the Lebanese diaspora across cities and continents.. But when I was older and more Lebanese kids moved to my area, we formed a gang so we could protect each other and I started bullying back. A range of factors impinge upon criminal behaviour . It seems that the police learned from him that the woman had stabbed his friend as well. Europe In the past there was a code among crime gangs in Sydney that bodies in the street were bad for business, says Michael Duffy, the author of Drive By, a new novel about a Lebanese crime family and the efforts of a bigoted, dispirited police force to lock them up. Arab Book Frank Hakim, who emigrated to Australia at the age of 20 or so, was the first prominent Lebanese criminal. None of the accused or the victims had been drinking alcohol and none had been taking drugs, even though having marijuana was an inducement offered to the two girls. As a policy, multiculturalism was introduced by immigration minister Al . We tried setting it up once but it didnt work, says Don Weatherburn, director of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. The Skaf gang used cunning methods to lure young women during a terrifying rampage in southwestern Sydney which changed the city forever. In other words, each man forced his penis into her mouth and ejaculated. It is across the street from the Lebanese central bank in Beirut, the Associated Press reported. This was also the position for the assaults and the robberies committed on the two victims. I continue to hold that view. It is a common matter during the process of sentencing criminal offenders that their counsel would present psychological evidence, sometimes psychiatric evidence and other evidence to create as strong a subjective case for the offender as could be presented. The theft occurred in a tightly secured area, further reflecting the cash-strapped country's continued decay. The blast flattened the neighbourhoods closest to the port, such as Gemmayze and Mar Mikhael tourist hotspots and the heart of Beiruts famous nightlife, now as haunting as Stalingrad. A large number of former Lebanese citizens immigrated to several major German cities under political asylum and refugee status. Thats whats so disturbing., Lebanese-born educator Keysar Trad believes criminality in the community is a by-product of overly strict parents who expect their children to excel at school, and racism in the classroom and playground that prevents them from doing so. I cant tell what some of the things are in the photos, what they once were. 'During the sentencing process at the end of the Skaf trials, I expressed the view that what this gang did was worse than murder. Lebanon has a population of approximately 4.6 million, with 18 recognised distinct religious . Taxpayers can be assured their money wont end up in the pockets of corrupt officials, according to Lex Bartlem, who served as Australian ambassador to Beirut between 2010 and 2014. Conviction of Skaf was inevitable. One of the victims, an 18-year-old woman, was raped 40 times by 14 men over four hours in an attack coordinated by mobile phone. In the case of the Lebanese in Australia , specifically Sydney, they took this to another level and built a bad reputation in a number of areas: organised crime, petty crime (robbing and beating up people), questionable business practices (famous for not paying for services rendered or under delivering). The evidence showed Mohammed Skaf to be a treacherous bully who betrayed the trust of the victim and made her, a sixteen-year old school girl, available to his brother and ten or eleven other men. When I came to reflect on the facts of this trial, I again found myself wondering what it was that caused Bilal Skaf and the others with him to behave in such a depraved and violent fashion against a completely helpless girl. Lebanese-Christians have been immigrating to Australia for a very long time now and they have assimilated extremely well into Australian society. The two girls were then abandoned in the middle of the night in an area they did not know and forced to humiliate themselves by seeking assistance at around midnight from two people who were returning home from a social event. Lebanese families across generations in both rural and urban areas, including changes over time in occupations, education, religion, community activities and family values. He writes that one suggested if sentences as large as that imposed on Bilal Skaf were allowed to stand rapists would in future murder their victims. The first community of Lebanese in Australia were Maronite Christians, quickly followed by a large Muslim community. He remained the dominant figure and was the person who directed everything that later happened on that night in the park at Greenacre. We are afraid there is some connection between these guys here and the guys in Lebanon, he said during a three-month visit to Sydney earlier this year to exchange information on criminal syndicates with the New South Wales Police Forces Middle Eastern Crime Squad. The population is diverse, having a large Christian religious base, being mostly Maronite Catholics, while also having a large Muslim group of Sunni branch of Islam.. Lebanon, in both its modern-day form as the Lebanese state . He was the gang boss and the organiser of everything that happened. 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