Sex beast Maurice Hawell married his cousin at the wedding which followed the horrific gang rape of three teenage girls at an Airbnb on his bucks night, Daily Mail Australia can reveal.
Hawell took younger brother Marius and groomsman Andrew David along with a pack of mates for the wild bucks party weekend in Newcastle which ended in the trio’s rape convictions.
A few weeks later, the Hawell brothers and David were pictured together at the glittering wedding as Maurice tied the knot with his cousin, Loubna Youssif.
It has now emerged the couple’s families are extraordinarily close, even in the tight-knit Sydney Assyrian community. It is legal for cousins to marry in Australia.
Happy photos from Maurice and Loubna’s ‘fairytale’ wedding belie the dark secret the men shared of raping the girls – two aged 18, and one 19 – just 36 days earlier.
In one picture from the wedding, Maurice and Loubna gaze adoringly into each other’s eyes, while a grinning Marius and smiling David lurk behind the newlyweds.
Walking among the 10-strong bridal party, the three men appear well-dressed and relaxed – a far cry from the descriptions their victims gave of them during the trial.
What they did to three sobbing and frightened girls in darkened Airbnb bedrooms is in stark contrast to the idyllic wedding scene shot in a golden field.
Maurice Hawell’s wedding party in April 2022, just 36 days after the rapes, included his fellow offending gang rapists, brother Marius (circled, centre) and Andrew David (circled, back)
Maurice Hawell (right) with his bride, his cousin Loubna, in April 2022. A month later he was charged with multiple counts of rape and is now in prison after being convicted in mid-July
The sordid details of the rapes were heard at a NSW District Court trial which began in June, and ended with all three being found guilty of multiple charges on July 15.
The trio will all be sentenced over two days in court in September.
But at her wedding on April 2, 2022, that was all still unknown for Loubna, her family, and their wedding guests.
Video posted online by the couple’s close relatives show Loubna and her family in the typically noisy celebrations of an Assyrian bride exiting her home to the sound of a flute and banging drum.
Wearing a a beautiful, hand-embroidered ‘princess’ gown by designer to the stars, Steven Khalil, Loubna holds up a bouquet of perfect white roses in triumph before climbing into a waiting white Rolls Royce Ghost.
Ms Yousef drove off with her father to the nearby St Thomas The Apostle Chaldean Cathedral in Bossley Park, western Sydney, to be married to Maurice Hawell.
She was marrying a man she had known all her life, but Loubna and her family were unaware detectives in Newcastle were already investigating the rape allegations.
The wedding party, with Loubna and Maurice’s mothers in stunning formal gowns , drove in a convoy of luxury vehicles to the reception, including Mercedes G Wagon SUVs and a $500,000 McLaren 720s convertible.
At the reception – now wearing a crystal tiara on her head – Loubna took the first dance with Maurice on the dance floor surrounded by white candles, with a fog machine slowly filling the air.
Loubna Yousif attends the trial of her husband, Maurice Hawell, after he pleaded not guilty to multiple rapes, but a jury found him liable and he now faces years in prison
Guests joined them on the dancefloor as a family member played saxophone on stage with his band, as the newlywed couple looking relaxed and happy.
Elsewhere though NSW Police investigation had already been taking statements from one of the rape victims after she alerted detectives. Others would later also come forward.
The rapes occurred over two nights, on Friday, February 25, 2022 and the next evening, at an Airbnb apartment on Parry Street, Newcastle, near the centre of the NSW Hunter Valley capital’s entertainment district.
Nine men in total, mostly of Assyrian-Australian background, travelled to the unit on the Friday for Maurice’s pre-wedding bash.
The groom-to-be and David, then both 28, were forging successful careers as a solicitor and civil engineer respectively, with the former Patrician Brothers College schoolboys enjoying the backing of their supportive families.
The previous year, Maurice had attended his sister’s wedding at which his fiancée Loubna had been a bridesmaid.
Maurice’s younger brother Marius was just 20 years old. Crown prosecutors said at the three men’s joint trial that all three were in the group which headed out to the nearby Cambridge Hotel on the Friday for a drink.
Two of the three victims, Miss A and and her 18-year-old friend Miss B, were at the Hunter Street pub with four other mates.
Miss A began speaking with ‘Matt’, a bucks’ party weekend guest, who was not accused of rape, invited her back to the Parry Street apartment.
One of the bedrooms in the Newcastle Airbnb where the the teenage girls were sexually assaulted by the Hawell brothers and Andrew David a month before they celebrated Maurice’s wedding
Marius Hawell (left), now aged 22, will be sentenced on the same day at Andrew David (right) in September, the day before Maurice Hawell faces Judge Gina O’Rourke to learn his fate
Miss A agreed, but only if her friend Miss B came along ‘as I didn’t want to go alone’.
Maurice Hawell had asked Miss B about the same time if she wanted to go back to the Airbnb.
Once inside the apartment, Miss B went into a bedroom with a man the Crown says was Maurice Hawell and Miss A went into a bedroom with Matt.
Miss A and Matt had sex but when a naked Maurice Hawell walked into the room naked and asked if he could join in, she said no.
Maurice Hawell had already had consensual sex with Miss B, who had also had consensual sex with Andrew David, but the two women then discussed ‘feeling uncomfortable’.
They two women decided to leave, but when they went into a darkened bedroom to retrieve their phones, Miss A was surrounded by ‘a swarm of people’, shoved backwards onto a bed, and her clothes pulled off.
Miss A said she was then subjected to a series of sexual assaults by three men who she could not identify but police said they were the Hawell brothers and David.
One of the teens said she was forced to engage in penetrative sex with a man she couldn’t see while another man knelt on her arms and thrust his penis into her mouth.
The following night, groom-to-be Maurice Hawell approached a 19-year-old woman on the street and persuaded her to come back to the rented Airbnb for pre-drinks – but instead ushered her into a bedroom.
Loubna Yousif at the preliminary wedding celebrations before her nuptials to Maurice Hawell in St Thomas The Apostle Chaldean Cathedral
The court heard that the trio of the two Hawell brothers and David gang raped the young woman inside a dark room that Saturday night.
On the day Maurice and Loubna were married and a relative posted a video of their festive preliminary celebrations, a well-wisher posted in Arabic: ‘May God bless you and congratulations on your marriage.
‘We wish the newlyweds a happy life, God willing.’
On May 6, 2022, police arrested and charged Maurice Hawell with eight counts of aggravated sexual assault in company and one count each of aggravated sexually touching another person and attempted aggravated sexual assault in company.
In early June, police arrested Andrew David at his family’s $3million mansion at Horsley Park in Sydney’s west, and on June 14, they arrested Marius Hawell.
All the men would plead not guilty to multiple charges, with the older pair insisting it was consensual while Marius denied engaging in any sex.
The jury found all three guilty of multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault in company relating to all three women, and of aggravated sexual touching and attempted aggravated sexual assault of one woman.
Maurice Hawell was found guilty of the attempted sexual touching of one woman, but the jury could not could not agree on the final count for all three men of aggravated sexual assault.
In dramatic scenes in Downing Centre Court, the Hawells and David were handcuffed and taken by prison officers down to the cells below, and off in prison vans.
Marius Hawell and Andrew David will be sentenced on September 17, and Maurice Hawell the following day.
