Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [78]
One witness told the newspaper, ‘I heard his head crack’,17 while another onlooker said of the attack on the downed bikie:
One lady who looked about 40 was waiting to check in with her husband when the brawl swept past. They hit him [the bikie] when he was down, they kicked him when he was down, a big bloke who called him ‘brother’ tried to pull them off him and they ran off when they saw the blood spurting from his head. The lady got people to help roll him over and started to work on him. She just jumped straight in and tried to help. They weren’t even out the doors and she was working on him trying to get his heart going by doing cardiac massage.
Another woman, a trainee nurse, tried to help, and there was a doctor who ran across and worked with the woman, one trying to stop the bleeding and the other working on his heart. She said, ‘He’s clearly got a fractured skull.’ He was dead before the ambulance got there. 18
Kneeling beside the dying bikie was a ‘big guy’ holding his hand and saying: ‘Hang on, Tone, hang on, Tone, c’mon, Tone, hang on.’19 But Qantas passenger Anthony Zervas, who was not even believed to have been a bikie, was dead. Four bikies were arrested as they fled the airport in a taxi and a spate of shootings followed the attack as the gang war spilled onto Sydney’s streets.
Witnesses to the incredible brawl in what is supposed to be one of the securest environments in the country were still struggling to come to terms with what they had seen. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said one. ‘I stood there stunned, turned around and there was this little girl of about five clinging to her mother’s hand, and her face was just white. She had seen it all, the guys swinging these heavy bollards at each other and then this massive pool of blood and a guy being worked on furiously by some onlookers.’20 But if the little girl had seen it all, unfortunately the CCTV footage had not, and the brawl turned into a public relations problem for Qantas.
In the aftermath a witch-hunt sought to assign blame for the breach of security. Newspapers reported that Big W has better security than the airport and that vital video evidence could have been lost in the fragmented system. A New South Wales police source told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘There are four, five different CCTV systems covering the sky bridge to the check-in area to the car park. The systems aren’t in any standardised format and they’re not recorded at a central point so [police investigators] have to try and get them into a format that can be used for evidentiary purposes. It’s possible that it has never been tested in this way before, but you would think there would be some kind of co-ordination between the different systems.’21
Terminal 3, where the brawl occurred, is run by Qantas, which is responsible for video coverage inside the terminal. It conceded that a security camera just metres from where the bikie died could not move quickly enough to record the incident. A Qantas spokesman told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘The camera located immediately above the group is a fixed camera that covers the wider check-in area. A moveable camera which can be clearly seen some metres further along was trained on the location of the attack as soon as a number of duress alarms were activated by staff.’22
Sydney airport is owned by the Sydney Airport Corporation, which is owned by Macquarie Airports, which in turn is managed by the Macquarie Group. It is responsible for security outside the terminal in the car parks and roads. In the year before the brawl, Sydney airport charged airlines $73 million for security. The airlines pass that charge on to passengers, the same ones who watched the brawl unfold. Despite this, the Airport Corporation was quick to point to Qantas