Posted on 08/17/2002 6:42:52 PM PDT by knighthawk
THERE are condoms scattered in the Corona's glovebox, female clothing on the back seat.
There's a man named Sam, a white van that pops up more than once, a $50 note at the Harbour Bridge toll booth and a city so dazzled by the Olympic flame that it has taken its eyes off the cockroach corners.
We're waiting for Cathy Freeman to breast the tape, but three detectives are connecting dots – starting to understand there is a group out there preying on teenage girls, communicating via mobile phone and masking their intent in Arabic.
While their colleagues took a $25 Olympic secondment bonus, three officers led by Detective Sergeant Michael Porta watched surveillance tapes frame by frame, painstakingly searched mobile phone records and began to hunt the hunters.
And then this guy's standing at the sergeant's desk asking questions about his mates. He's just committed a rape.
These bastards have so much front it's frightening.
Constable Tamer Kilani's got a copper's instinct. A gut feeling for no good.
Twenty-two days before the Olympic opening ceremony, when the brass was shining its buttons and the streets were in coloured flags, something caught Constable Kilani's eye.
Four men standing around an unremarkable brown Toyota Corona in Wattle St, Punchbowl. Nothing odd about that, but something didn't feel right.
Constable Kilani called in a registration check, made a U-turn as he learnt it was expired. The car was already speeding away.
The constable planted his foot; the four abandoned the vehicle and dived for cover.
Just 15km from the site which would soon host 651 athletes and 500,000 spectators, Constable Kilani called for back-up and ran after them. They stopped and sneered.
These four young and arrogant males of Lebanese origin knew Constable Kilani, an Arabic-speaking Muslim officer. And he knew them. There was no use running. He knew their names, knew where they lived.
It was 2.15pm on August 24, 2000. Back-up arrived and Constable Kilani and the others started searching the men and the brown car.
One of the men, a 17-year-old TAFE student who called himself Sam, had a condom in his pocket.
Constable Kilani opened the car's glovebox. His eyes were drawn to five loose condoms and some women's clothing in the back seat.
He knew that detectives attached to the Child Protection Enforcement Agency were investigating at least four different gang rapes and attacks on young women in the area by males of Middle-Eastern appearance.
The men were taken back to Bankstown Police Station for questioning about the car and its lack of registration. They mouthed off all the way.
Then something very curious happened. A 15-year-old in a tracksuit came to the police station counter wanting to know what was happening to his mates.
The devil is in the detail, and the officers knew that it must be more than coincidence that this arrogant teenager fitted the description of an offender from an earlier incident.
That day, as the Olympic torch made its slow journey from Port Macquarie to Coffs Harbour, Strike Force Sayda came into existence – with three dedicated detectives.
What would ultimately be learnt about the sickening activities of the young men in the car and their extended group during August 2000 would reveal an ugly underbelly of Sydney and a cultural conflict that would shake the city's foundations.
Later, sitting in the dock of court LG4, Sam watched, an arrogant sneer on his face, as his barrister suggested his young victim had moaned with pleasure in a putrid, stinking Bankstown public toilet. In the witness box her face contorted with disgust and disbelief.
Sam and two of the others in the car with him on August 24 would ultimately be convicted for their roles in the degrading six-hour gang rape of the young woman we will call Jane.
As Sydney churned on to its second anniversary of the 2000 Olympics, the nation heard how these three young men – together with 11 others, all of Lebanese origin – had, six days after the car was pulled over at Punchbowl, brutally gangraped Jane at three locations, taunting her and calling her an "Aussie pig".
When it seemed to be over, Jane straightened her knee-length black skirt, splashed some water on her face and, in fright, took a few tentative steps outside the toilet.
A dark-skinned woman known only as Mary offered her help, then delivered her back to the rapists.
While Jane's saviour turned out to be her enemy two other young women, who we will call Nicki and Amanda, were luckier.
It was 12.30am on August 11 when Anna and Con Christodolou, on their way home from a night out, turned into the darkness of Narellan St at Greenacre.
Near the corner of Northcote Ave, they saw two traumatised young women huddled together and calling for help.
They stopped reluctantly, Mr Christodolou fearing it might be a set-up. But after hearing the girls' story they drove to a nearby house to call police, then waited with the terrified pair.
Nicki and Amanda had fallen prey to the same group of young males as Jane would 20 days later.
On August 10, night shoppers at Chatswood on Sydney's north shore were unaware of the evil intent lurking among them.
Eight young men including Sam's older brother – an 18-year-old customer service employee with State Rail – had moved out of their comfort zone in the west and moved north in search of prey.
Among them were a 17-year-old who worked at a paving business and who had gone to school with Sam, a 17-year-old who would be described by his victims as "the fat guy", his 16-year-old friend, 18-year-old apprentice bricklayer Mahmoud Chami and Belal Hajeid.
All of them lived in the Greenacre area and were part of a tightknit group of friends.
As the evening wore on they moved into hunting mode, lurking around sidewalk cafes in Anderson St.
Nicki and Amanda, friends aged 17 and 18, finished their Thursday night shopping and were waiting for their bus home when four males sauntered over to chat.
Soon another four males joined the group. Amanda accepted a cigarette and before long they had agreed to go for a drive with the men to smoke some marijuana.
Together with four males, Nicki and Amanda got into an old white van which some in the group called a "shaggin' wagon". There were no seats in the back – only foam.
The other four males went in a red Toyota.
On the Harbour Bridge the van driver, who has never been caught, handed a $50 note to the operator to pay the $2.20 toll.
All the while the men conversed between vehicles in Arabic on their mobile phones.
About 11pm the white van finished its journey – at Northcote Park, Greenacre. But instead of the promised marijuana there was terror and degradation – as the women were forced to repeatedly perform oral sex on eight men.
The attack on Nicki and Amanda was, at this stage, the tip of the iceberg.
There had been two earlier attacks upon teenage girls, one of whom escaped from a train after being indecently assaulted by a group of four young men, including the fat guy, and another who had been forced to perform oral sex on males in a park.
Police were trying to establish links.
One would come on August 12 when an old white van very much like the "shaggin' wagon" turned in to the public parking bays at Gosling Park in Greenacre about 9.30pm, in convoy with a blue hatchback.
Sitting inside a red four-door hatchback already parked there was a 16-year-old girl we will call Cathy. Dressed in black pants and blue woollen jumper, she watched with rising fear as eight young men got out of the van. They included Sam's older brother, the railway employee who told her he also was called Sam. There were three more men in the blue car.
Earlier that night Cathy's mobile telephone had rung at her home at Glenwood Park.
Sam, whom she had met eight months earlier at McDonalds, invited her on a drive to the city. He arrived between 8.30 and 9pm, in a red four-door hatchback with two other males. Mobile phones ran hot as the young men called friends, speaking in Arabic which Cathy did not understand, organising the posse for that night's rape. Cathy was dragged by the hair, held down by up to a dozen men and raped twice at gunpoint.
As news of that attack reached the ears of Sgt Porta a link was being made – a white van had been involved in both the August 10 and August 12 attacks and the name Sam was becoming a common thread. So was the use of mobile phones.
Olympic euphoria was building, and so was the evil lurking in the Greenacre and Bankstown areas as the days of August wore on.
They were crimes born of elaborate planning, where young white women were being made pawns in an increasingly violent outpouring of sexual subjugation.
As the three detectives assigned to the cases worked to establish links, Police Commissioner Peter Ryan was out to cement his reputation as the best Olympic security adviser in the world and help land himself a job with the Athens Olympics.
As Commissioner Ryan hosted yet another Olympics-related news conference announcing the Stadium Australia "lockdown", Sgt Porta and Detective Senior Constable Olly O'Keefe carefully studied each rolling frame from a railway surveillance video taken at Bankstown railway station on the afternoon of August 30, the day of Jane's rape.
They watched intently as, among the hundreds of people getting on and off trains, the young victim came into view along with five men.
The officers sat up straighter in their seats as they realised that three of the men – Sam, the fat guy and a 16-year-old – had been in the car pulled over six days earlier by Constable Kilani. The police net was closing.
That night midnight raids were conducted on the homes of Sam, the fat guy and the 16-year-old.
Swept up in the growing Olympic excitement, people were queuing for hours at SOCOG's Broadway headquarters to buy Olympic tickets.
The officers of Strike Force Sayda were not among them; they were busy getting copies of the mobile phone records of their suspects.
Scanning the calls made on the nights of the different rapes, they discovered that the men had been in constant contact with each other on those days.
Furthermore, their mobile phone signals had been bouncing off towers closest to the rape sites – showing they had, in fact, been in the areas at the relevant times.
With 10 days to go to the Olympics, IOC boss Juan Antonio Samaranch was being feted by Sydney's Olympic heavyweights on a tour of the Olympic village.
That night, 16-year-olds who we will call Laura and Ellen were taken to a fibro Villawood home with a hole in the front wall and a slashed flyscreen.
Inside that family home with its old-fashioned kitchen they were separated from each other, taken to different rooms and repeatedly raped at knifepoint while the men employed a sick game, playing them off against each other.
As detectives learnt with horror of yet another gang rape it became evident to everyone that this was a far more serious problem than at first thought – and Inspector Kim Mackay from Crime Agencies was assigned to head up the strike force.
This week the leader of the gang of rapists was jailed for 55 years.
Sydney will never be the same again.
This is so horrible. I had read of the Muslim gang rapes before. That is horrible enough...but that victims were NOT ALLOWED to mention ethnics in the victim impact segment of the trial...?????????????????
WHY is it only a hate crime when a person with pale skin commits the crime????
You sign up today and rehash a four year old post simply to demonstrate that you are illiterate? Too funny!!
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