70 girls attacked by rape gangs

By John Kidman, Police Reporter

POLICE examining more than 20 brutal sexual attacks on teenaged girls in just 10 months believe they have uncovered a frightening new crime associated with race.

Hospital records and police data show that at least another 50 similar incidents have been reported in the Bankstown area of south-west Sydney over the past two years.

The victims, one as young as 13, were allegedly lured to meetings then gang raped and horrifically humiliated.

All of those suspected of perpetrating the acts come from the same cultural and religious backgrounds.

Now police are concerned that the acts may become culturally institutionalised.

They are now planning a social research program to examine the phenomenon and help them decide how to eradicate it.

Fifteen youths and men have so far been charged with more than 300 offences relating to matters since mid-2000 alone.

They are all of Middle Eastern extraction. None of those involved is presently before the courts.

Their alleged victims have all been Caucasian, aged between 13 and 18.

The attacks are continuing.

In the most recent, up to two dozen offenders are suspected of taking part in the repeated violation of a teenager in a school yard at Guildford three weeks ago.

In a chilling postscript, several of the group allegedly scrawled degrading slogans on her body.

Before being brutalised, other victims have reportedly been questioned about their Australian heritage or forced to endure taunts about their attackers' prowess.

Last August, an 18-year-old woman was allegedly raped 15 times by 14 youths who passed her from one group of mates to the next after she was coerced from a train at Bankstown station.

Allegedly assaulted in turn by four of the pack in a toilet, the woman was driven to further local locations, raped again and again and, as a final act of humiliation, sprayed down with a hose.

Another victim was, the same month, dragged by the hair to a secluded park, stripped and held to the ground behind a shed, where she was allegedly defiled.

In response to what was then thought to be an isolated rampage involving several groups of males, Detective Inspector Kim McKay was appointed to head Strike Force Sayda, which was given the task of halting it.

As Sydney struggled to cope with the Olympics, 12 of the most experienced officers available were drawn from Bankstown and Crime Agencies.

They had identified a nucleus of six to eight suspects who lived within a kilometre of each other, and as many again who were at least loosely connected socially.

In tandem with a public appeal by then-Crime Agencies commander Clive Small for women to take sensible precautions, a string of arrests were made and at Christmas, Sayda began focusing on preparing briefs of evidence for the courts.

In total, the strike force identified 17 sex attacks on 20 teenagers.

It laid charges in relation to eight of the matters and 10 of the alleged victims.

What emerged in the following months, however, was the grim reality that the problem hadn't gone away.

A 16-year-old girl was savagely assaulted by at least a dozen males in Bankstown's Memorial Park on February 10.

Drugged, severely traumatised and abandoned, she was found by her distraught father after failing to make it home the night before.

A separate investigation was launched by another Crime Agencies branch, the Child Protection Enforcement Agency, which identified a cousin of a suspect in an earlier known assault from a DNA sample at the scene.

Police believed the match suggested that what they were dealing with was bigger than the work of several semi-affiliated groups but still able to be linked.

Although under legal and professional pressure not to discuss Sayda's work in detail, Inspector McKay issued a second warning to the community on March 11.

Other officers made the point that those allegedly responsible for the Sayda rapes were said to have been expert at "luring" girls into compromising situations by using flattery, appearing to be the friend of a friend or offering to buy coffee or drinks.

Unfortunately, the public didn't take heed.

On the night of Wednesday, May 9, two girls were dragged into a car on Parramatta Road at Camperdown.

Refusing the initial offer of a lift, they shared cigarettes with the two men they'd just met before walking towards their bus stop but never made it.

Both were driven to Homebush, violently assaulted and dumped.

In the wake of the last known assault, at Guildford on July 7, senior police this week conceded they were at a loss about how to prevent more attacks.

According to one officer who spoke to The Sun-Herald, they were now dealing with an average of at least one Sayda-type incident every month.

As a result, moves are under way to commission expert social research into the problem.

The concerns come in the wake of controversy over Police Commissioner Peter Ryan's claim that crime is falling and previous remarks he made about ethnic gangs, which led to accusations of US-style racial profiling.

Police have been hampered because in several cases - including some reported by a local hospital - the women have been unwilling to assist them out of embarrassment or fear of reprisals.

And some were simply too traumatised to help.

The Sun-Herald