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. 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. By this time, she had been kidnapped and raped vaginally, orally and anally more than forty times by fourteen men. At no point, however, did he identify the men in the red van. They are also willing to purchase from Chinese importers and to wholesale to other groups, such as Romanian and Lebanese dealers. Finally, the rural areas of Sydney are home to small-time gangs who act as enforcers for the bigger gangs in the city. 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 Lebanese got a bad reputation after the 2000 Sydney gang rapes where 9 Lebanese-Australian youths gang raped several Anglo-Australian women in multiple attacks over the course of 2 months. Apart from the three men I have indicated who were on trial, there was also in the car they were travelling in, which was a white van, a young man with an intellectual disability, fourteen years of age, who later pleaded guilty to a series of sexual assaults. I also told the jury that 'this is not a court of morals' and explained that they might not approve of the conduct of some of the participants because they thought they were acting immorally, but that was not the question at all. RELATED: Manhunt under way after shooting in Sydney suburb. An estimate of the total Lebanese population in Australia, consisting of Lebanese-born and their descendants, is approaching 250,000. Lebanese mafia is a Colloquial term for organized crime groups which origin from Lebanon and Levant. 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. Ive been a journalist for 20 years and Ive covered some really tough stories, Im no stranger to these sorts of violent upheavals, but this one feels different, Abouzeid says. The Lebanese-born population of Australia stood at 70,325 persons in the 1996 census. This surprising evidence was used by the Crown to bolster its case about identification. He had convictions for offences of dishonesty and it was thus easy for the Crown to establish that he was a man of bad character. Single expats: 1.773 USD. When later interviewed, Chami claimed that Bilal Skaf told him, 'There's a slut at the Bankstown Trotting Club.' I said to myself, I cant see this anymore, theres nothing I can do here, Im just going to go to the hospital to give blood and see how I can help.. This large group of men got out of this van. Confined at home due to Victorias lockdown, Maakasa has taken to social media to connect with others in the Lebanese diaspora across the world and offer assistance however she can. In 2002, people born in Australia were imprisoned at a rate of 156 per 100,000 while those born overseas were imprisoned at a rate of 146 per 100,000. If I opened up my lunchbox and pulled out a Lebanese roll, I would get hassled. SYDNEY (Reuters) - The children of refugees who fled Lebanon's civil war for peaceful Australia in the 1970s form a majority of Australian militants fighting in the Middle East, according to. Lebanon has a population of approximately 4.6 million, with 18 recognised distinct religious . With Lebanons economy in tatters, led by a government widely accused of corruption, international donors and diaspora networks are the only hope for desperate Beirutis facing a food shortage and lack of shelter. The existence of criminal activity among these communities is not the issue. 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 . The gang's ringleader, Skaf, denied his role in the crimes despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt and showed no remorse even after he was sentenced to 55 years in prison. Crimes under Lebanese laws may not be considered offences in Australia. Five computers were stolen along with the servers, Lebanese TV channel LBCI reported. Lebanese Crime, Official Cowardice In Australia. Growing up in western Sydney, I was bullied and picked on for everything I did and stood for. In my view, all of these men remain a continuing threat to the Sydney community and particularly to young women. Bilal Skaf was one of the people who then approached the victim whom he grabbed by the hair. ', 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.'. 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. Drive-bys were virtually unheard of in Sydney until the mid-1990s, when the sons and grandsons of hardworking Lebanese migrants emerged as serious players in a world of organized crime, hitherto dominated by Vietnamese and Calabrian gangs. EXTRACT: After the sentences were imposed, many people would say things like, 'I'm glad you got those Lebs,' but I found myself trying to explain that I did not 'get those Lebs' at all. One of Australia's most redneck outback parliamentarians, Bob Katter, is the descendant of Lebanese immigrants. 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. Yet, the new gangland war fails to capture the imagination. He told them they could expect there to be media publicity and that they should ignore anything they read outside court. One upstanding group of Lebanese males got sentences up to 49 years prison for kidnapping girls on the street and raping them. Once Lebanese kids gets involved in gangs, theyre killed or in prison before they get a chance to grow up., There is no data available on the prevalence of criminality in Sydneys Lebanese community because people who are arrested are not legally required to give information on their ethnicity or heritage. He remained the dominant figure and was the person who directed everything that later happened on that night in the park at Greenacre. Bilal Skaf again had vaginal sex with her. from There is no concept in our law that there is a category of person called loose women who are deemed somehow to consent and certainly there is no law that merely because a young woman might give an indication that she was friendly with someone and didn't protest too much when they were laying hands on her that she therefore was consenting to anything. Hamzy, 44, was gunned down in the . Who could believe anyone would consent to being assaulted, robbed, abused and threatened? Since then, migration has significantly reduced and growth rates have become steady. A lot of the racism against Lebanese people in Australia however dates to before 9/11. Criminal organizations are mostly based around extended crime families with a large number of associates from their community. Bilal Skaf sat throughout the sentencing process looking as if he could not care less about any of it. 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. And an otherwise law-abiding majority erect a wall of silence when dealing with police they regularly accuse and sue for thuggery and racial profiling. Its just a mess. Abouzeid was in Melbourne at the time of the blast, relying on relatives to send photos of the destruction. Learn how your comment data is processed. The crime was comparable to Lebanese gang rapes in Sydney. 'These were not random attacks and, in my view, they were aimed at creating terror in the community. Breaking news Police Recorded Incidents and Hate Crime: Australia 105 Police Recorded Incidents and Hate Crime Overseas 106 Immigrants as victims of crime 109 Bias in the Criminal Justice System 112 . Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. 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. Impact Lebanon has raised over 5m (A$9m) since it launched its disaster-relief fundraiser immediately after the blast. This then meant there was not sufficient evidence against him of identification. None generated anything like the public attention these trials drew. This reflected his complete contempt for the court process and his rejection of any notion of contrition or remorse. Manorama Online The assailants broke the door and its lock into the archive room. Sports The most common crimes involve physical altercations, trespassing, burglary, and damaging public or private property. I think the sentences struck a chord with the public generally because the attacks were predatory and carefully planned. This went on for some time and eventually Mohammed Skaf used a mobile phone to summon his brother Bilal. I was lucky; I got a second chance. What we know about the Beirut explosion video explainer, caused by the unsafe storage of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, anti-government protests in Lebanon in October 2019, president Emmanuel Macron toured the devastated scenes. According to exclusive statistics from the armed crime squad, there has been a five-fold increase in non-fatal shootings in the north-west in four years and the region now sees almost two thirds of Victoria's non-fatal shootings. Skaf clearly was the leader. Mohammed Skaf was charged, like his brother Bilal, with two counts of sexual intercourse without consent because he had arranged for the girl to be made available to his brother and others to have sexual intercourse with the victim. Prospective jurors were told the trial might last a month and would involve allegations that the three accused men, with several others, sexually assaulted two young women against their will. In the park, each girl was dragged by the neck to a different part of the park and forced to let these men have oral sex with her. 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.. France 'I reject this complaint as well,' he writes. I hope that those who have been released do rehabilitate or, at the very least, that they do not re-offend. The 37-year-old Carlingford man and 40-year-old Dundas Valley man have been charged with Dealing in the proceeds of crime - money or property worth $1,000,000 or more, contrary to section 400.3 (1) of the Criminal Code (Cth). America I came to my apartment to see the damage. 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. I cant tell what some of the things are in the photos, what they once were. Restaurateurs in Bankstown pay up to $50,000 a year in protection money or risk having their premises firebombed, while Shia and Sunni Muslims exchange invectives and blows on the streets. Each of Ghanem and Hajeid's counsel put forward arguments that they had not been properly identified and were not present. But to this day Finnane is regularly asked about the Skaf case, sometimes by strangers, at social functions and on other unexpected occasions. Arab Book Luckily, a man came around the corner, saw her plight and approached her. The complainant, who had been sexually assaulted by fourteen men something like forty times over four hours, could not identify him. His counsel acknowledged the force of what I had said but again said that he would be presenting no evidence. 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. Home News Video- A crime shocked the Lebanese in Australia.. New facts about the murder of Abboud Yazbek. Im still in a state of shock. As well as these men who went to trial, there were four other men who subsequently pleaded guilty to participating in this spate of sexual assaults. What made this trial startlingly different from most rape trials of which I was aware were four matters: 1. 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. ASIAN ORGANISED CRIME IN AUSTRALIA A Discussion Paper by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority February 1995 (return to table of contents) 5. And these guys are well armed. The other two were also fairly small, but with the sorts of faces that could easily be forgotten. It was obviously carefully planned and skilfully executed. Lebanese Migration to Australia There have been three main waves of immigration from Lebanon to Australia. The latest death toll stands at over 150 but is expected to climb. This is probably Katter's most famous and funny video, wait until the end. Melbourne experiences a moderate crime rate and is generally considered a safe city for living and travelling. Bilal Skaf was charged with every instance of forced sexual intercourse by anyone in the gang on the basis that he was an accessory before the fact to every crime and was just as responsible as the man who carried it out. The criminal justice system judged and punished the perpetrators. Single expats: 1.630 USD. 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. Those involved in these crimes committed them between 10 August and 30 August 2000 on three separate occasions. Football Bilal Skaf was the eldest and was about 21 years of age. He acted throughout the trial as someone who wanted to be noticed. 26 May . 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. and Lebanon were processed at a higher rate than the Australian-born in each of the five years. What we found was that in a matter of weeks they were excelling the other kids in school. 34. A GANG war over drug turf that has been simmering for two decades has erupted into a series of public shootings that has turned Fairfield in western Sydney into Australia's most dangerous suburb. It was because the police had given up fighting back. Skaf was talking on a mobile phone to other people in Arabic. The evidence of the two girls was given in closed court hearings but I permitted the press to have access to the transcripts of the evidence on the basis that the names of the two girls were not revealed and no photographs were taken of them. The largest wave of migration from Lebanon occurred between 1976 and 1981 during the Lebanese Civil War. The . TV Compared to the Arab population in Australia, a much larger number of Arabs are in Germany and have traditionally settled in large numbers in Lebanese regions such as Tripoli, the Beqaa Valley and Beirut where they have integral part of the country's Sunni community. This was evidence of incriminating phone calls between him and Chami. 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. 'It seemed clear to me that these men were sending out a message to the community in Sydney,' he writes. In 1996, 72 per cent of Lebanese in Australia lived in Sydney. Average rent in Canberra. In certain parts of the region, life is structured around extended clan families, a number of whom are active in criminal activities such as narcotics trafficking, kidnapping for ransom and car theft. I continue to hold that view. 33. But material losses, even huge painful ones, are things that one day can be replaced. ShiaChat.com may be unavailable periodically Saturday night to Sunday evening while we migrate to new servers and perform some necessary updates. sport The trial was quite tense. They were an attack on society, but why? The men in the red van also sexually assaulted them in the same fashion, as well as punching them and kicking them. You cant fathom the despair and destruction., Kassis, an English teacher, is one of thousands of Beiruti residents who have been on the streets, cleaning the shopfronts and homes devastated by Tuesdays blast. 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