The ringleader of Sydney’s 2000 gang rapes has begged prison authorities not to transfer him to a new jail, saying he fears he’ll be assaulted if he has to mix with other inmates.
Bilal Skaf, 44, is serving a 55-year sentence for orchestrating a series of brutal pack rapes by a group of Lebanese Muslim males against seven 16 to 18-year-old Australian girls in the Bankstown area in the city’s southwest.
He is due to be moved to a new maximum-security facility after the government on Friday ordered the closure of aging sections of the maximum-security Goulburn Correctional Centre.
But Skaf has pleaded with prison staff not to move him, saying the Junee and Clarence correctional centres will be too far for his family to travel to visit, and arguing that he is at risk of being attacked, The Daily Telegraph reported.
“I’m scared, I’m gonna get bashed up if I move jail – and my family won’t visit,” he told an officer at Goulburn.
“I will get bashed up, I don’t want to move. At Goulburn I’ve got a segregated yard where people can’t get me. I’ll get bashed up again.
“Dad and the family won’t come and visit me anymore, it’s too far for them from Sydney.”
The move is part of a major prison shake-up affecting 170 of New South Wales’ most notorious killers and rapists, with Goulburn’s 140-year-old maximum-security wing being closed because its small cells are no longer considered fit for purpose.
The jail’s modern Supermax facility, which houses Bondi terrorist Naveed Akram, will remain open.
Skaf was 18 when he and brother Mohammed committed the savage gang rapes with Belal Hajeid, Mohammed and Mahmoud Sanoussi, Mahmoud Chani, Tayyab Sheikh and Mohammed Ghanem, as well as at least one other individual not identified by the court as he was deemed intellectually disabled.
Another five suspects have never been brought to justice.
One teenage victim was called an “Aussie pig” before all 14 men gang-raped her 25 times over six hours. Another 16-year-old girl described the gang telling her: “You deserve it because you’re an Australian.”
After being charged, Bilal Skaf became infamous for his grinning mugshot, as well as for smiling during his trial, and has never shown any remorse. His mother was then banned from visiting him in 2002 after he passed her letters containing drawings of the jail interior considered security sensitive.
In 2015 he suffered facial injuries after being bashed by three other inmates in Goulburn, where he was moved after officers at Sydney’s Long Bay jail uncovered a plot by other prisoners to inject him with HIV-infected blood.
Header image: Left, Bilal Skaf’s mugshot. Right, Bilal Skaf during a jail visit with his family (NSW Corrections).
