Australia's Most Murderous Prison: Behind the Walls of Goulburn Jail

by Phelps, James

  ‘Most of the Muslims are grouped together in the one yard,’ the officer said. ‘The Lebanese Yard is completely Islamic. They don’t have to go far to find a like-minded individual, and there is little doubt it makes it easier for certain individuals to share their extremist ideals.’

  The situation has become so serious that convicts are being searched for any signs or clues in a bid to help identify possible extremists within the New South Wales Corrections system.

  ‘At the moment they have us taking photos of tattoos,’ said an officer, who asked to remain anonymous. ‘We take photos of pictures, letters, tattoos. When we strip search them, if there is anything out of the ordinary or ISIS related, we take pictures and send them to the investigations unit. They get the ISIS flag tattooed, things like that.

  ‘It’s a worry – a massive worry – and there has been heavy training to deal with the problem over the last 18 months.’

  Welcome to a world of secret codes and listening devices, of prison conversions and prayer groups, of terrorists and spies.

  The Recruiter

  He strokes his beard as he looks through the fence. He scans the yard.

  Him. Maybe him. Yeah, he should be easy.

  His target is now firmly in his sights. Locked and loaded.

  ‘Over here, my brother,’ he fires, his voice easily carrying across the 15-metre divide that separates the Lebanese Yard from the Koori Yard. ‘Come speak with me. Come speak with Allah.’

  The Indigenous inmate is soon listening intently; his hands are full of wire fence and his ears are full of the Word of God. The bearded man speaks of virgins, paradise and what happens to those committed to jihad.

  Come join us. Virgins. Paradise. Jihad.

  Soon the Indigenous prisoner is in a Friday prayer group …

  A self-styled sheikh, jailed for whipping a man 40 times with an electric cord for breaking sharia law, Wassim Fayad has been placed on an ASIO watchlist because of his relentless – and successful – bid to convert Goulburn inmates to Islam.

  He is one of several prisoners placed under surveillance by the CIG because of terror suspicions. Let’s find out why …

  Cristian Martinez wanted help.

  ‘It means I am going to tie you up, brother,’ said Fayad, the man Martinez had sought out for guidance as he battled drug addiction. ‘That’s what you need.’

  Three men, Fayad’s devoted followers, grabbed Martinez and pushed him into his bed. The religious outlaws had forced their way into the 32-year-old’s Silverwater home sometime after midnight on 17 July 2011.

  Whack.

  An electric cord smashed into his bare skin, leaving a rising red snake on his back.

  Whack. Whack. Whack.

  The red welt continued to grow.

  Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.

  Soon there was blood, the relentless plastic cord slicing through skin.

  ‘Stop!’ the victim cried. ‘No more. Stop. Pleeeeaseee.’

  Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.

  ‘This is for your own good,’ the reply came after another five slaps.

  Fayad had worked himself into a frenzy. He whipped Martinez 40 times in total, leaving Martinez bleeding, bruised and in agony for a week – the man he was supposed to be helping.

  Fayad was one of four men arrested for the assault. They claimed they had punished the man after one of the alleged attackers – Zakaryah Raad – had attended Martinez’s unit block in the hours proceeding the attack and saw ‘beer bottles strewn throughout the premises’.

  Fayad claimed Martinez had broken sharia law, the moral code and religious law of Islam, by consuming alcohol. The whipping was his punishment – his lawful punishment.

  Sydney magistrate Brian Maloney disagreed. ‘It was never about the Islamic faith or Islamic law,’ he said. ‘And my findings bear witness to the fact. It was simply one man who happened to be Muslim, assaulting another man, to effect a criminal purpose. To assist in that purpose, [Fayad] recruited three young men who had been groomed and duped into believing he was righteous and learned in Islamic law.’

  Maloney said Fayad had whipped Martinez because of unpaid debts.

  ‘Mr Fayad,’ the magistrate said, looking directly at the accused before sentencing him to a minimum jail term of 16 months, ‘by your actions you have brought much shame on the Islamic faith. You have proved yourself unscrupulously cunning, deceptive and dishonest. You profess to be a religious man, however, you resorted to violence upon Mr Martinez.’

  Fayad was already a man of interest to counterterrorism police. He called Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph in 2011 and told a reporter that 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden had ‘died a martyr’. He was then one of two central leaders in a Sydney CBD riot later that year but, to his credit, he worked with police to quell the angry crowd.

  Fayad was granted bail in 2013 after appealing his sentence for assaulting Martinez. And that’s when counterterrorism police swooped …

  Fayad was arrested after a seven-month investigation that attempted to establish links between the ‘sheikh’ and a syndicate sending young Muslims to fight in Syria, and a failed ram raid on an ATM machine in northern Sydney. Counterintelligence police led the investigation because they suspected the proceeds of the crime would have been used to fund terror. The Counter Terrorism and Special Tactics Command charged Fayed with aggravated break and enter. He was also facing a separate charge of accessory after the fact in an unrelated murder case. Needless to say, his bail was revoked, and Fayad was sent to prison. To Goulburn, of course …

  ‘There are lots of inmates converting to Islam,’ said a current serving officer close to the intelligence program. ‘And Fayad is in the middle of it. Three-quarters of the guys in the Aboriginal Yard would now be Muslim, by my estimate. They are the group mainly being targeted for conversion, partly because they are next to the Muslim Yard; they are considered easy to bring into the fold because of their history of persecution.

  ‘Fayad is well known to the CIG. When he first came to jail the officers were really worried about him. They didn’t want to put him in with the Muslim inmates because they were worried he was too extreme and would lead them into fundamentalism.

  ‘The boss had intel that when he came through the MRRC [Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre at Silverwater] he had already tried to convert a lot of inmates. He’s very charismatic and also, we believe, radical. He will try and convert anyone.’

  Fayad was first kept in segregation from the Muslim majority in the Lebanese Yard so, wait for it … he wouldn’t convert anyone.

  ‘They put him in D Wing at first,’ the officer continued. ‘It was the next wing away from the Muslims, and it was soon realised to be a very dumb move. Put it this way: there were a lot of people to convert in that yard! Common sense soon prevailed and he was put in the Muslim Yard where there weren’t any non-Muslims to convert.’

  But he didn’t give up.

  What, a fence? Is it soundproof?

  ‘He spent all of his days talking through the fence to the other yards,’ the officer continued. ‘It’s easy to hold conversations through the gap we walk through, because it’s only about 15 metres.’

  There is nothing wrong with attempting, or succeeding, to convert someone to Islam. Every Australian has the right to both choose and preach their religion. In fact, becoming a devout Muslim is, in this author’s opinion, a good thing for inmates, provided they are not led down a radical path.

  ‘The issue is that he is suspected of recruiting them for jihad,’ the officer continued. ‘For example, one of his sidekicks came out and was talking to one of the officers recently. He was a Muslim bloke, and he described some of the recent converts as dumb-monkey bomb-chuckers. That’s what he said about the Aboriginals. He said they were being converted to do all the dumb shit. He is just one of many concerns we have in Goulburn regarding terrorism.’

  Pay to Pray

  They called them the ‘Supermax jihadists’, easily recog
nisable with their beards and beads, shaved heads and Korans, and they forced an unprecedented prison crackdown in 2007 after authorities alleged Islamic extremists were using an al-Qaeda training manual for instruction on how to take over the jail system.

  It was alleged that up to 40 inmates in New South Wales had established an internal prison organisation to recruit members to radical Islam and resist interrogation.

  Former New South Wales attorney-general John Hatzistergos said extremist leadership groups had been set up across the state’s jails. ‘The insidious nature of these activities remind us we have to be constantly vigilant to these types of threats for the security of our correctional system.’

  Former prison boss Ron Woodham spoke of his conversion fears following the attorney-general’s statement. ‘There is nothing wrong with conversion to Islam for the right reasons,’ he said. ‘But we believe there have been conversions taking place for the wrong reasons.’

  In 2007, 12 of the 37 Supermax inmates were either Muslims or new converts to Islam, and they were described as having a close-knit community inside Australia’s most secure jail. And so the monitoring began, including new powers that allowed for the 24-hour surveillance of Muslim inmates in Supermax.

  ‘We have to be able to control every movement and every utterance because of the threat they pose,’ Hatzistergos told Sun Herald reporter Alex Mitchell. ‘We don’t want to see any risk to people either inside or outside the system. We simply can’t take our eye off them.’

  Corrective Services were also suspicious that outside identities and/or groups were transferring money to influence inmates to convert to Islam.

  Nightclub murderer and Brothers 4 Life (BFL) founder Bassam Hamzy was singled out as the fundamentalist group’s leader and was believed to be responsible for several Islamic conversions. The infamous criminal had a picture of Osama bin Laden seized from his cell.

  ‘We don’t have a difficulty with people taking up religion in jail,’ Hatzistergos said. ‘A lot of people do and that can be beneficial. Where we draw the line is where religion is really a camouflage for other activities. If any person thinks that by taking up religion that somehow it is going to lead to them being treated differently on a day-to-day basis, then they will be sadly mistaken.’

  Hamzy, incredibly, may have been using religion as a guise for an audacious escape bid in a prison scam that Woodham described as a ‘pay to pray’ plot.

  ‘At first [conversions] seemed innocent enough,’ said Woodham. ‘It wasn’t causing any management problems, and we actually gave them prayer mats and things they needed to pray.’

  But suddenly they stopped praying.

  ‘That’s when we suspected more and began investigating,’ Woodham said. ‘And over time we realised they were far more organised than we thought.’

  Investigations revealed that the inmates who converted were being paid up to $100 a week. The payments were made by way of money orders, originating from Bankstown. They were placed into accounts belonging to associates of the jail converts.

  The payments were not just made to inmates at Goulburn, but also to other converts to Islam at prisons across the state. The money was coming from Hamzy’s loyal criminal associates on the outside and deposited at his request. Authorities believed Hamzy was buying loyal followers to create a prison gang that would obey his every demand. He would use them to take over the jail and escape in a joint operation conducted with his street gang.

  Woodham said Hamzy was the most dangerous inmate in the correctional system.

  ‘This is not the first time he has organised things in jail. He was involved in corrupting staff, who have been charged with corruption. At one stage he was convicted of conspiring to kill a witness against him in a trial using a mobile phone from inside another jail. So he is an extreme high-risk prisoner and a danger, not only in Supermax, but to people on the outside.’

  Spy Games

  A current guard, who asked not to be named, outlined the new controversial inmate surveillance laws.

  ‘We monitor all their phone calls,’ he said. ‘All the calls that they make in the yard are monitored, recorded and kept on a database. That system is backed up every week and the file sits there just in case ASIO want anything. Anyone who is deemed flagged, and those flags come down from CIG, their mail is read on the way in and on the way out.’

  The following are extracts from the prison case files of the men who have been identified as the Supermax jihadists and/or have been convicted of terror-related offences.

  HAMZY, Bassam, DOB: 03/01/1979, received into the HRMCC April 19, 2002

  Extreme High Risk Restricted: Classification A1

  Hamzy is in Supermax serving a 22-year sentence for the murder of Kris Toumazis outside the Mr Goodbar nightclub in Darlinghurst 1998 and conspiring to murder a key witness while in Lithgow Jail.

  ‘Murder, conspiracy to murder, drug importation, use of a weapon to prevent apprehension, and intel the inmate was heavily involved in illegal and covert activities in jail,’ his file reads. ‘Drugs, mobile phones and yard disturbances. Alleged to have led an attack on inmate Binse in Unit 3. Involved in corruption of an officer in 2003 in the HRMCC. Involved in passing unauthorised items to his solicitors and misuse of legal phone calls. He is a demanding and covert inmate. Moved to the STG program at Lithgow, where he ran a substantial criminal empire with mobile phone. Placement at Goulburn MPU July 6, 2008, in segregation.

  ‘Noted as compliant with unit routine,’ his file continues, ‘but remains a very high-needs inmate. Hamzy is heavily occupied with court matters.’

  CHEIKHO, Khaled, DOB: 19/03/1973, received into the HRMCC November 21, 2005

  Extreme High Security: Classification AA

  One of the ‘Terror Five’ arrested on charges of purchasing chemicals and explosives with potential targets including the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney’s south-west.

  ‘Described by sentencing judge as one of the main conspirators in the terrorist offences,’ his file reads, ‘Cheikho has been noted as compliant with unit routine but has been argumentative with other inmates in the unit. The period of Ramadan has contributed to him being short-tempered.’

  CHEIKHO, Moustafa, DOB: 25/02/1977, received into the HRMCC August 3, 2007

  Extreme High Security: Classification AA

  Another of the men charged in the Sydney terror plot, Moustafa wanted ‘violent jihad’, which involved the killing of those who did not share his fundamentalist, extreme beliefs.

  ‘AA inmate,’ his file reads. ‘Nephew of Khaled and seen as a follower that is influenced by his uncle. Cheikho has been noted as being compliant with unit routine. He has been involved in an argument with another inmate in the unit, but this appears to have been settled with staff speaking to him in regards to the problem.’

  EL-ASSAAD, Wassim, DOB: 10/11/1977, received into the HRMCC April 14, 2003

  Extreme High Security: Classification A2

  Sentenced to life for his role in the murder of Kings Cross drug king Danny Karam in December 1998.

  ‘Involved in the White City shoot-out with police,’ his file reads. ‘Was returned to mainstream population from the HRMCC. Returned to the HRMCC on 27/07/06 after being found in possession of a mobile phone. Involvement in covert activities.’

  MAWAS, Rabeeh, DOB: 01/03/1977, received into the HRMCC June 10, 2002

  Extreme High Security: Classification A1

  Also sentenced to life for the murder of Danny Karam. ‘Previous aggressive behaviour towards staff,’ his file reads. ‘Association with identified security threats. Also involved in contraband. Inmate lost patience and assaulted two staff members in HRMCC. Continues to have little contact with his counsellor, only seeing him for support issues.

  ELOMAR, Mohamed, DOB: 05/03/1965, received into HRMCC November 9, 2005

  Extreme High Security: Classification AA

  A Terror Five member who plotted a series of attacks in Sydney between July 2004 and Novem
ber 2005.

  ‘Has extensive financial resources,’ his file reads. ‘One of the main conspirators, along with Chiekho K. Noted as compliant with unit routine, polite to staff and maintains contact with counsellor for support issues.’

  HASAN, Abdul, DOB: 24/08/1969, received into the HRMCC November 21, 2005

  Extreme High Security: Classification AA

  Another member of the Terror Five, sentenced for his role in planning terror attacks aimed at forcing the Australian government into changing its involvement in both of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

  ‘Noted as compliant with unit routine,’ his file reads. ‘And polite in interaction with staff.’

  LODHI, Faheem, DOB: 28/12/1969, received into the HRMCC September 24, 2006

  Extreme High Security: Classification AA

  A convict arrested for plotting attacks on the national power grid and several Sydney defence installations. He was sentenced in Australia’s first major terrorism case, and his incarceration sparked the new AA classification to deal with inmates convicted of terror-related crimes.

  ‘Known recruiter to extreme Islamic views,’ his file reads. ‘First person to be convicted of terrorist-related offence under the Anti-Terrorism Act 2005. Connected to Willie Brigitte in connection with the plot to blow up the Lucas Heights nuclear facility. Noted as compliant with unit routine, polite in his dealings with staff.’

  ASLETT, Dudley, DOB: 25/05/1971, received into HRMCC April 2, 2005

  Extreme High Security: Classification A1

  A Muslim convert in prison for taking part in the brutal 2003 gang rape of a 16-year-old girl.

  ‘Offences of murder and multiple rape attracted significant media attention,’ his file reads. ‘Convicted of escape on three occasions, most recently an attempt from court in 1995. He has assaulted two Corrections officers and threatened to kill staff. A lengthy history of self-harm. Has converted to [Islam].

  ‘Aslett appears to be coping well within the unit. He stays out of the politics that occur and has resumed his artwork; this is something that he enjoys and keeps him occupied.’