Charges soon over murder of Sudanese schoolboy Daniel Awak
DOUG ROBERTSON, MICHAEL McGUIRE, KEN McGREGOR
Adelaidenow
November 14, 2008 12:30pm
POLICE expect to lay charges within days over the stabbing death of Sudanese schoolboy Daniel Awak, says Commissioner Mal Hyde.
Daniel, 14, was stabbed to death and another teenager was admitted to hospital in a critical condition with knife wounds after a fight among a group of 12 Sudanese Australians.
Mr Hyde said today in such investigations it always took time to sort through reports and other material.
"But the advice I have received this morning is that in the next couple of days there may well be charges laid," he said.
Police said they had not yet identified a clear motive for the attack, but understood there were a number of altercations which led to the incident.
A 16-year-old boy was arrested at the scene and charged with aggravated assault on police and resisting arrest, but the allegations against him are not related to the initial brawl.
Mr Hyde said while relations between police and the Sudanese community were good, police were concerned about the possibility of retaliation.
Measures had been introduced to prevent further attacks, including extra patrols in key areas of the city where Sudanese youths were known to gather, he said.
Meanwhile, it has emerged the knife believed to have been used to stab Daniel was bought from a city store just minutes before the Sudanese schoolboy was killed.
A teenager of African appearance bought a 15cm knife from a store at 3.33pm on Wednesday, a shop owner told The Advertiser yesterday.
Moments earlier, the teenager had put a pack of smaller-bladed knives back on the shop's shelves.
The teenager had taken these knives to the counter, but turned back before paying the shop attendant and picked up a longer-bladed knife.
It is understood police have interviewed the shop owner, indicating it was the weapon used to stab the Sudanese teenager. Police last night would neither confirm nor deny this.
Daniel died from a stab wound to the heart on the footpath outside Fleet Steet Newsagency, near Grenfell St, about 3.50pm – about 17 minutes after the knife was bought.
Police said about 15 Sudanese youths started fighting in City Cross Arcade at 3.40pm. The fight continued on Grenfell St and then across the road and into the newsagency, about 30m from the road.
'The stabbing brought a tragic end to a promising life that had been spent trying to avoid violence. Australia was the fourth country Daniel had lived in since his birth in war-ravaged Sudan in 1993.
Friends and family were devastated yesterday at the sudden death of a boy they described as "loving and sensitive".
Schoolmate Tom Cooper left his own tribute on AdelaideNow yesterday, calling Daniel "a good friend of mine".
"He is one of the nicest people I know and one of the people you would least suspect this would happen to," he said in his message.
Daniel was described as a good student but one who loved sport.
"He was good at anything he tried – basketball, cricket, but soccer was what he was passionate about," said one friend.
One of Daniel's soccer coaches, Monica Dimasi, also left a heartfelt message on AdelaideNow. "He was the sweetest and coolest kid I've met," she said. "Daniel had a great personality and would have been an excellent cop, which he was thinking about becoming one day."
Born in Southern Sudan, Daniel moved as a child between his mother's village of Yirol and the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.
Like millions of others, Daniel and his family fled horrific violence that overtook his country in the Sudanese civil war.
Up to two million civilians died and another four million were forced to flee their homes.
Daniel was a member of the Dinka tribe, a mainly cattle-farming people in the south of Sudan who were heavily involved in the Sudanese Liberation Army, which fought the war with the Khartoum-based government.
But his family tried to keep Daniel away from the worst of the violence. From 1999, he lived with his mother in the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya, an enormous compound that was home to 70,000 refugees from Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia.
In 2001 he was separated from his mother and sent to live in Uganda where he stayed with an aunt until 2004, when he moved to Australia at age 10.
His mother moved to Australia in 2006 to join him, along with his three brothers and three sisters.
Family and friends said that when his mother, Nyadit, arrived in Australia, Daniel became a much happier boy. They said he had missed her terribly and struggled to come to terms with why he had been sent away from Africa.
But with his mother's arrival he settled down and was seen as a happy child, although not immune from the pressures he faced from within his own peer group. His father is believed to be a geologist who lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
Daniel's death has also raised the issue of how Australia copes with an influx of people from a background that is as soaked in violence as Sudan's.
Around 1500 Sudanese people have arrived in South Australia in the past decade, fleeing the violence in their homeland.
Police have arrested a Park Holme boy, 16, and charged him with aggravated assault and resisting arrest. A second youth who was stabbed in the leg during the fight remains in a serious but stable condition in Royal Adelaide Hospital.
A murder charge has not yet been laid but police said yesterday they had identified all the key figures in the incident.
Deputy Police Commissioner Gary Burns yesterday said police were concerned by rising levels of violence in the Sudanese community. In the past 16 months, Sudanese people had been involved in 450 offences, resulting in 258 arrests. "This is double the level of offending for the population of the state," he said.
"They come from a culture which has had serious warfare, some have been child soldiers, and they don't have the conflict-resolution skills that others who have grown up in Australia have, and as a result we have seen an increase in crime."
Meanwhile, police yesterday charged a woman with aggravated assault after another stabbing incident. Three people, including the accused woman, were treated in hospital for injuries after an alleged fight in the centre of Marion Rd, Richmond, at 2.15pm.
A man was in a serious but stable condition in Royal Adelaide Hospital last night with a stab wound to his right shoulder. A second man was being questioned by police.
Video and comments by Alan Jones of Sydney's 2gb
The excuse makers and apologists for the lefts rotting dead corpse of Multiculturalism, will no doubt place the blame for the horrific events depicted above, at the feet of white Anglo Saxon Christian Australia.
I cant wait to hear their latest attempts to spin their Frankenstein's latest atrocity.
Race to lower crimes stats
Andrew Bolt
Friday, November 14, 2008 at 07:04am
I AM sorry. I may have misled you about the Sudanese gangs I defended last year.
Back then, I denounced the hate-merchants demonising Sudanese here as misfits, too prone to violence.
True, one gang of boys had just bashed a policeman, but I gave you police statistics showing the crime rate among Sudanese immigrants was no higher than for the rowdy rest of us.
But days later, gangs of African youths fought each other in the Highpoint shopping centre. And Indian taxi drivers kept getting robbed by African men.
Just this week, Sudanese gangs in Adelaide attacked each other in a clash so deadly that one youth was killed and another near death.
But those police statistics tell us there’s no problem among the Sudanese. Which makes an article like this unfair and unhelpful.
Yet, I started to sniff something when Police Commissioner Christine Nixon banned police from using the word “gangs” to describe, well, gangs.
I worried more when an African community leader, Berhan Ahmed, asked Nixon to stop police checking Africans in Flemington quite so often.
And now charges have been dropped over a riot in Racecourse Rd last December in which some 100 Africans surrounded 21 police trying to arrest a rock-thrower, and sent one to hospital with suspected cracked ribs.
At the time, the force defended its officers. Region 3 boss Insp Nigel Howard denied they were racist or too heavy-handed: “Enough is enough.”
It’s a different story today, and Sen-Sgt Mario Benedetti, in charge of Moonee Ponds police station, says he suspects charges against the rioters were dropped because of their race.
The explanation that Supt Jack Blayney gave our reporter, Mark Buttler, didn’t seem to deny it: “The withdrawal of these charges followed consultation with the members and youths concerned and was deemed to be the best outcome for both parties.”
Pardon? Is this a peace negotiation between two warring gangs, then, one of them the police? And is there not actually a law to uphold, regardless of race, and a force to defend?
But no charges means no offence recorded. And the police can keep telling us: the Sudanese crime rate is no higher than everyone else’s.
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