A member of Melbourne’s notorious Apex African gang has been spared jail for an “extremely violent” hammer rampage he committed after being released from immigration detention.
Sudanese refugee criminal Isaac Gatkuoth, 27, was given a two-year community corrections order in Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday, and Magistrate Abigail Burchill said she hoped the order would bring him “some peace”, Leader reported.
He pleaded guilty to intentionally damage property, unlawful assault, and without authorised/excuse to enter a private place over the October attack, where he and four others surrounded a home and smashed windows and cars with a hammer. He was already out on bail for handling stolen goods at the time.
Gatkuoth had his visa cancelled in 2016 after being sentenced to 16 months in youth detention for a drug-fuelled carjacking where he pointed a gun at the head of a driver – who was traumatised and went on to commit suicide – and spent six years behind bars awaiting deportation.
He was then released in 2023 along with hundreds of other criminals, including murders, paedophiles and rapists, by the Labor government after the High Court ruled that a “stateless” Rohingya child rapist could not be detained indefinitely.
Ms Burchill described the attack as “extremely violent” and “dangerous”, but said she took into account the immigration detention system’s “torture on people”. The court also heard that Gatkuoth faced “daily racism” and had experienced “war trauma”.
“You’ve never done the work on the burden of anger that you carry because of the terrible things that have happened to you,” Ms Burchill said.
“You made the biggest display of violence … 12 days after a decision that allowed you to keep your visa … after you’d spent all that time in an immigration detention … you were reckless and destructive to yourself.”
The ultra-violent Apex gang, made up of Sudanese teenagers and originating in Dandenong, terrorised Melbourne in the mid-2010s, and became notorious after hundreds of members rioted in Federation Square during the African Moomba festival in 2016.
Public concern about African gang crime eventually led to a police and media blackout on the subject, rather than a crackdown on the gang activity itself.
Victoria Police stopped publishing the nationality of offenders in crime statistics in 2018, and the corporate media led a pile-on against then-Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for mentioning the crisis, and have refused to use the term “African gang” ever since.
The then-deputy police commissioner Shane Patton, who was later promoted to Chief Commissioner during the state’s draconian Covid lockdowns, said at the time that the there was no African gang problem because “networked criminal offenders” were not technically “gangs”.
The crime statistics for the year ending in March 2018 showed that Sudan and South Sudan-born offenders were overrepresented in crime statistics by a factor of 10 – committing 1.1% of the offences despite being 0.1% of the Victorian population.
They also committed 3.8% of aggravated burglaries, 8.5% of aggravated robberies, 1.5% of car thefts, 1.2% of common assaults, 4.9% of riot and affray offences, 1.8% of serious assaults, and 0.7% of sexual offences in the state.
At that time Victoria was home to Australia’s largest South Sudanese population of about 9,000 people, most living in Melbourne.
In 2024, African youth made up about 50% of the young people in custody in Victoria, up from 19% in 2021 when they were only 0.5% of the youth population.
Header image: Left, right, Isaac Gatkuoth (Facebook).
