A violent African gang member who avoided being deported despite committing violent crimes has been charged over an attempted home invasion while out on bail for other alleged criminal offences.
The Sudanese refugee, 27, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was part of Melbourne’s notorious Apex gang and had his visa cancelled after being sentenced to 16 months in youth detention for carjacking a man at gunpoint. His victim later committed suicide.
But he was given a second chance when he was released from immigration detention along with 223 other criminals after the High Court ruled in 2023 that a “stateless” Rohingya child rapist could not be detained indefinitely. As of October last year 65 released detainees had gone on to commit more crimes.
The gang member faced court again last week to apply for bail after being charged with attempted aggravated home invasion, two counts of criminal damage, three counts of unlawful assault and possession of cannabis over an alleged attempted home invasion in Melbourne’s southeast, the Herald Sun reported.
He was already on bail after being charged with handling stolen goods in August when he joined a group of men who allegedly surrounded a home, climbed on the roof and smashed the windows in with a hammer and an angle grinder, the court heard.
His defence barrister Merran Shanahan told the court the prosecution’s case was weak, disputed whether there was an actual attempt to enter the home, and said there were issues about the legality of the random search that led to the stolen goods charge.
She also told the court that her client suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after fleeing Sudan when his father was killed, resulting in drug use as a “coping mechanism” since he was a teenager.
But Supreme Court Justice Kerri Judd refused the bail application, citing the man’s criminal history, drug use, and him being on bail at the time of the alleged offences.
The mother of his carjacking victim told the Herald Sun she was sickened to hear the gang member had been released and charged again.
“Because of him I don’t have my son,” she said.
“He doesn’t deserve to be here.”
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 2021, Africans, mainly South Sudanese, made up 19% of the young people in custody, while being only 0.5% of the youth population.
Featured image: Apex gang members riot in Melbourne in 2016 (X).
