re: lock up your daughters...
Absent father who bred a gaggle of monsters
By Miranda Devine July 24, 2005 The Sun-Herald
It was a destructive process, but in the end the legal system did what it was supposed to do and jailed four brothers guilty of a series of gang rapes in 2002.
The brothers' habit of videotaping their attacks as souvenirs damned them. Of course, there are several victims who never came forward, and police point to a gap between January and June 2002, when they suspect more attacks took place.
But still the brothers, MSK, 26, MAK, 25, MRK, 20 and MMK, 19, cannot be named because two were juveniles when the offences took place.
The privilege of anonymity is just another insult heaped on their victims and the community that gave them citizenship when they arrived from Pakistan over the past six or so years.
But to their father, a GP in Sydney's west, it is Australia that is unjust.
Last month he told Sydney Morning Herald journalist Natasha Wallace: "You are the enemy of the Muslim . . . they [his sons] are not rapists."
Dr K has maintained his sons' innocence all along, even after viewing in court one of the videotapes police found inside their rented Ashfield house. It showed a comatose 13-year-old girl, drunk or drugged, and the brothers performing degrading criminal acts on her body.
During one of his sons' trials, Dr K revealed his views about Australian girls to a reporter: "What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don't go out at night."
In court Dr K complained his sons, "did not know the culture of this country". He only has himself to blame for that.
He incubated his monsters in one of the most remote and primitive corners of Pakistan, in a small village near the Afghanistan border town of Peshawar where Osama bin Laden lived in the 1980s, plotting against the West.
In Pakistan, "honour rapes" have a long tradition. In one case that has become an international feminist cause, a woman was gang raped by 13 men on the order of a village council as a punishment because her brother had befriended a woman from another tribe.
Police say Dr K, 65, arrived in Australia with a medical degree in the early 1970s, gained local qualifications and became an Australian citizen. He went back to Pakistan to find a wife but, strangely, left her there for the next 30 years while he commuted. His wife bore him one daughter and seven sons. Only when they were approaching adulthood did he bring them to Australia. You have to wonder why he had so little faith in his adopted country that he avoided bringing up his children here. The end result was that the four brothers became cultural suicide bombers. They destroyed the lives of trusting girls, damaged the dignity of the court and trampled on our traditions of racial harmony and respect for women while throwing away their own futures.
They mocked the court, demanded Muslim jurors and lawyers who were experts in Muslim law overseas. The oldest brother, MSK, swore at a judge, faked mental illness and tried every ruse to delay proceedings and wear down the victims. The mother of one victim tells of farcical scenes in court when MSK, sitting at the bar table representing himself, threw broken glass at her, hurled pears at the jury and tossed a glass of water at the judge's bench.
The mother was covered in broken glass but she recalled last week: "He didn't actually scare me. He was nothing."
Elsewhere in the civilised world MSK would have been placed in a cage after such a display. But in NSW he couldn't even be handcuffed for fear of prejudicing the pear-encrusted jury. The boundless restraint of the court towards the K brothers was no doubt admirable. But it is unsustainable on any ongoing basis
