Mohammed Skaf has been in prison since he was 17. Photo / News Limited
Mohammed Skaf has been in prison since he was 17. Photo / News Limited
Baria Skaf has been waiting for this moment for two decades, since her two elder sons were taken from her family home and labelled as some of Sydney's most reviled gang rapists.
For years Baria and her State Rail worker husband Mustapha kept the bedrooms of their sons Mohammed and Bilal unchanged from the day they were arrested and taken away.
The family then moved house just a few metres away in the same Greenacre street, and have recently upgraded the second home which Mustapha so proudly paid off with decades of hard work.
Mohammed, now a 38-year-old man in place of the teenage boy taken away in handcuffs, returns to a new life.
His tiny younger siblings are now all grown up, with 22-year-old brother Hadi already sporting a criminal record after pleading guilty this month to supplying cocaine.
What kind of life can this physically grown-up adult with little experience of the real world hope to lead after 20 years of institutionalisation, 3pm lock-ins and daily contact with the crims in the prison yard?
Mohammed Skaf's release on parole has been continually delayed by his reluctance to address his offending behaviour in the gang rapes committed in 2000, around the time of the Sydney Olympics.
Skaf, his older brother and their ghastly cohorts' reprehensible crimes not only scarred their victims, but changed Australia.
At his sentencing, Judge Michael Finnane described Mohammed Skaf – still then a teen – as "a vicious, cowardly bully, arrogant and a liar, as well as being a rapist".
When initially locked up as a 17-year-old in Kariong Juvenile Justice Centre, Skaf made sexually inappropriate remarks to female staff.
He showed no remorse for his part in the crimes – which included his luring a 16-year-old girl who believed Mohammed was her friend to Gosling Park, Greenacre.
There she was raped by Mohammed's brother Bilal and another man while 12 males stood around and watched and laughed.
And during Mohammed's incarceration in adult prisons he continued to blame his victims for initially agreeing to go with him because "they came out with us as soon as I asked them".
Nineteen years ago almost to the day, I stood in the modest family living room of Mohammed Skaf's parents discussing what had preceded their boys' descent into ignominy.
Baria and Mustapha Skaf were polite and welcoming, but Baria still could not quite believe her sons were guilty.
At a later meeting, she would voice the hope that it was all a terrible mistake and her "boys" would be freed.
It was September 2002 and the so-called Skaf gang of nine convicted rapists – out of 14 original suspects – had just been sentenced to a total of more than 240 years' jail.
The house was furnished with pastel patterned sofas, cream lace curtains and varnished wooden tables.
Photographs of Mr Skaf, Baria and their four children adorned the walls, alongside religious texts written in Arabic.
The surprise was that in many snapshots taken when Mohammed and Bilal were young, years before the birth of her younger children Hadi and Noora, Mrs Skaf did not cover her head with a scarf.
She dressed in denim skirts and T-shirts; it was only after the Skaf sons' arrest that she permanently donned the hijab.
The Skafs attended Chullora Primary School, Strathfield South High School and Belmont Boys School, where Bilal played soccer and in 1995 won two karate trophies.
Mrs Skaf, then aged 41, had both Muslim and Christian friends.
Mrs Skaf said she would have been happy for her sons to marry Christian girls "with a good heart and a good brain".
This seemed at odds with her sons' attitude to non-Muslim Australians.
Apart from racist jibes at the rape victims, one of whom was called an "Aussie pig" during her ordeal, Bilal Skaf was the author of a message found on a mobile phone seized by police.
It read: "When you are feeling down … bash a Christian or Catholic and lift up."
Baria's eldest child was just starting work on the railways and seemingly following in his father's blameless footsteps when he became a violent rapist.
Baria's photos of Bilal back then, in his freshly pressed State Rail uniform, show a 20-year-old looking younger than his age and nothing like the "menace to any civilised society" described by Judge Michael Finnane at his trial.
In the months leading up to the rapes, Bilal had visited Lebanon.
Mohammed Skaf's eyes are closed in his mugshot after being arrested for the 2000 gang rapes. Photo / NSW Police
Baria played a video of the trip showing Lebanese males enjoying themselves with Bilal.
Baria was born in the Lebanese city of Tripoli and migrated here when she was 17.
Family tragedy struck long before her emigration, with her father dying in an accident when she was three, then losing her mother while her brother was killed in the Lebanon war.
"I have no father and no mother," she wept. "My family, it gets smaller, so I have my kids so my family can get bigger. And then they take my Bilal away."
Watching the video of Bilal and the carousing males, it was hard not to imagine that the meeting of the two cultures – Lebanese and Lebanese-Australian – might have put ideas into his head.
The gang led by Bilal Skaf with Mohammed asked one of the rape victims if "Leb c**k tasted better than Aussie c**k" and told her she would now be raped "Leb-style".
Baria Skaf could never seem to come to terms with how her boys could have gone so terribly wrong.
While Mohammed was still at secondary school, Bilal was leaving school altogether.
He worked as a spray painter before Mustapha used his own good employment record to get his son on the State Rail payroll.
Mustapha Skaf, who also emigrated to Australia aged 17, in 1976, had worked for almost 25 years with State Rail before his sons were arrested, rising to the role of customer service operator.
In July 2000, aged 18, Bilal Skaf started working part-time in the weeks leading up to the Olympics.
Skaf produced two silver "medals" and a gold pin sent to him and his son for their work during the Games.
"I've always worked hard to support my family," Skaf said. "I do all I can to provide a house for my wife and children."
But Bilal was already falling into cannabis use and bad company, and then returned home from Lebanon, perhaps with a head full of notions about Australian society.
In 2002, Skaf was keeping the boys' bedrooms undisturbed because "it gives us hope that one day (they) will be back".
Back then, Baria Skaf could not sleep and felt "it would be better if I had died."
Just days later, however, both the Skaf parents were in trouble with the prison authorities holding their sons.
Mustapha Skaf was accused of offering a bribe to a prison officer after phoning the Goulburn Supermax jail where Bilal was being held.
When a duty officer told him outside calls had to be booked in advance and approved for set times, Mustapha offered to pay $100 to be put through to his son.
Mustapha was denied prison access while the matter was investigated, but it was later dropped after it was found to have no substance.
In the same month, Baria, was caught on video attempting to smuggle a letter to Bilal's then-fiancee out of Supermax after he handed it to her during a visit and she placed it in her socks.
Corrective Services NSW barred her from visiting all NSW jails for a period of two years.
Now aged in their 60s, Baria and Mustapha Skaf, will be welcoming one son home, their family almost complete.
The NSW State Parole Authority released Mohammed Skaf to parole, finding it was better for community protection than to keep the offender inside until he had no supervision requirements.
Neighbours in the street who have seen younger brother Hadi burning up and down on his motorcycle will now have to contend with a convicted rapist in their midst.
Mohammed will be on parole for two years, subject to strict conditions including electronic monitoring, and is banned from entering the Liverpool, Fairfield, Blacktown and Parramatta LGAs, where the rapes took place.
But they will have to wait until at least February 2033, until the eldest and the rape gang mastermind Bilal becomes eligible for parole.
