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Les Kennedy | May 13, 2008
AN 18-YEAR-OLD man has faced court charged with twice raping an 82-year-old tourist in a park at West Ryde on Sunday.
Robert El-Chammas, of Ermington, crouched low in the dock and covered his face with his hands to avoid stares from the public gallery and a court sketch artist throughout his brief appearance before the magistrate Jane Mottley in Burwood Local Court yesterday.
El-Chammas was dressed in prison greens following his arrest near where the woman - a tourist from Korea visiting her daughter - was attacked.
Police allege El-Chammas attacked the woman as she went for a walk in a tracksuit through Anzac Park, near the West Ryde shopping centre, at 6am.
He is alleged to have twice raped the woman after dragging her to the ground near a tree near the intersection of Anzac Avenue and Herbert Street.
Police said screams from the woman roused nearby residents who called police.
The first officers at the scene, a male probationary constable and a female constable from Ryde police, allegedly chased El-Chammas through the park and, after a struggle, arrested him.
He was charged with offences including aggravated sexual assault, inflicting actual bodily harm, assaulting and resisting police. He was also charged with inflicting actual bodily harm upon the woman with intent to have sexual intercourse.
The woman is recovering at Royal North Shore Hospital.
In the dock, El-Chammas hung his head and refused to make eye contact with Ms Mottley as she read the charges.
As she refused him bail, she asked him: "Do you understand just what happened?"
El-Chammas: "Yes."
She remanded him to appear in Burwood Court on June 2.
El-Chammas continued to shield his face as he was taken to the underground cells. His father, who sat at the back of the court, left the complex shielding his face with his jacket.
At the scene of the attack yesterday residents living near the park told of being woken up by the woman's screams and the shouts of a man.
One woman, who asked not to be identified, told of waking her husband when she heard what at first she thought was a violent argument happening in the park across from their unit.
The woman said she was awake at the time feeding the couple's seven-month-old son.
"It was light enough to see into the park. You could see the frost on the ground. I looked out the window and saw a man screaming at a woman who was also screaming," the woman said.
"He was on top of her and at first I thought he was trying to strangle her. He got her down and I saw her legs in the air. I could see he was hitting her and that's when I grabbed the phone and called triple O."
"He went up the street, turned around and came back. He stopped the taxi and looked at them and then drove off. I don't know if he called police, but that's when a police truck came down the road as I was talking to the operator," she said.
The woman said that on seeing the police the man got up off the woman and fled back through the park with the officers in pursuit.
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