K.A. WHYTE was at Sydney Airport with her husband, waiting for a flight to Jakarta in 2009 when she sensed a commotion nearby.

“I could hear shouting and banging and loud noises ... I looked over and saw 18-19 men pushing and jumping and punching and I naively thought the security men would stop them ... but they didn’t,” she recalls.

As the brawling men moved closer to her, Ms Whyte, a trained nurse looked around for vulnerable people.

“I’ve been in nursing for 40 years ... I was looking around for the ‘D for danger’ such as mums with prams”.

She noticed an elderly couple with walking sticks nearby.

“I said to my late husband ‘here, you grab my handbag, I’m just going to move these people in case something happens’.”

In the middle of the affray she noticed three men bashing one “particularly skinny guy”.

“They were bashing him and one of them picked up a bollard and started hitting him on the head and I just yelled ‘stop it, you’re going to kill him’,” she says.

“And the fellow looked at me ... and then they did. They just killed him. Brain injury, bang, dead.”

Ms Whyte appears on tonight’s episode of Insight, which focuses on people who witnessed violent crimes.

It turns out the man who had delivered the fatal blow with the bollard was the national president of the Comanchero bikie gang, Mick Hawi.

The man who lay bleeding on the airport floor was an associate of the Hell’s Angels, Anthony Zervas.

She says at the time she had no idea they were bikies, saying they “weren’t dressed in what (she) would have called bikie clothes”.

Ms Whyte says she got a good look at the man who had brandished the bollard and made a mental note of his appearance.

After the group ran off, she “started working on the guy on the ground ... because, you know, he’s somebody’s son, somebody’s brother,” she recalls.

“You can’t believe this is happening, you think ‘somebody is going to stop it, the police will be here any minute.

“And then you realise oh my gosh, they’re not going to come and I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to have to help this guy, I’m going to have to do this.’”

She was struck by the brutality and the viciousness of the bashing and presumed the men involved were drug affected. Her years working in emergency departments gave her an insight into the affects of different drugs and “alcoholics don’t tend to do that sort of violence.”

Ms Whyte says it was the fact that “it was three on one ... the incorrectness of it” that caused her to yell out.

“I yelled because it was just wrong. He was a slight man and the guy who was attacking him was big and no match for anybody.”

Finally, the police arrived. She didn’t provide them with a statement because there were so many people present that she presumed it would be “self evident” what had gone on.

But later, in Jakarta, she was contacted and told there weren’t many eyewitnesses and the CTV hadn’t actually captured quality footage of the incident. For some reason, they weren’t working properly that day.

When they asked her whether she could identify the perpetrator she said “absolutely”.

She went to Australia House in Jakarta and immediately identified Mick Hawi.

She soon discovered that there was a good reason the police didn’t have many willing eyewitnesses.

“I had heard that the bikie gang had got to a few of the witnesses and because they had young children they were scared and nervous, which you can well understand. They didn’t want to have any part of it. And gosh, as a mother, you would do that,” she says.

Despite the fact that she is a mother too, she didn’t hesitate and went ahead and gave evidence.

“I was living in Jakarta and my children were at that stage all over the world and nobody actually got to me,” she explains.

Ms Whyte says if she had been threatened, she “would have done what everybody else would have done”.

“If I had had small children and had been threatened I certainly would have thought about it a lot deeper and acknowledged the fact that people in my family or I was going to be harmed.”

The “look of hate and anger ... and no remorse” on Mick Hawi’s face that day is etched into Ms Whyte’s memory.

“He was killing and I was overwhelmed ... I have never been so close to seeing that rage in a human being before. It was just horrible.”

She says the court process was a terrifying experience.

“They were all bought in and were sitting to my right and I spotted the perpetrator and if looks could kill, I would have been dead,” she recalls.

“I thought I recognised a couple of the other people who were assisting him. I felt quite intimidated. They’re quite close, looking at you ... it’s not pleasant at all.

“I just wanted to get out of there really quickly and I thought ‘oh my gosh if I have to get any closer or if they bring him any closer, I’m really not sure how I’m going to handle this’ because they were very dark and the looks that I was getting were very dark and I said to myself ‘what have I got myself into here?’”

Despite that she says she didn’t regret speaking up because “what they did was just so horrible”.

The incident had an impact on her work life.

“I guess with my training [as a nurse] we have the ability to departmentalise things ... you know, think it through, box it and put it away.

“After working in the emergency department for 30 odd years I then decided that [the incident] was the icing on the cake — I no longer wanted to be in the emergency department because ice was starting to come in ... there were a lot of stabbings.

“So I’ve done the full circle and just work in maternity now which is lovely because I have a birthday every day.

“I have completely changed my nursing career ... I just don’t want to go there any more.”

Mick Hawi went to jail, but was released in 2015 — news that stunned Ms Whyte.

“I was shocked that he was actually released when he was, it was a plea bargain of some sort ... obviously he gave some information that dobbed somebody in”.

But his freedom was short-lived. He was gunned down as he climbed into his Mercedes just 3km from his home in the suburb of Bexley in February.

Ms Whyte takes no comfort in his death.

“A few people at work said ‘well that’s retribution for you, an eye for an eye’ and I said ‘no it’s not’.

“People that kill ... somebody will replace him ... it’s just how people like that are”.