By Angus Dalton and Sally Rawsthorne
Two people were shot through the windscreen of a car on a busy Sydney street on Sunday afternoon, in what police believe may be an escalation of Sydney’s gangland tensions.
Emergency services were called to Church Street in Granville just after 5pm on Sunday, and found four people in a white Toyota HiLux ute underneath the M4 bypass, police said.
Two men have been shot in Sydney’s west, one of whom has life-threatening injuries.Credit: Angus Dalton
Two men in the driver’s and front passenger seat had suffered multiple gunshot wounds. The injuries to one of them were life-threatening, police sources said on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak. Two other men in the back seat were uninjured.
Soon after, fire crews were called to Merrylands West after reports of a car fire. Police found a car and a tree alight. Later in the evening police set up a crime scene where authorities were called to a second burnt-out car in another Merrylands suburban street.
Investigators are treating the events of Sunday night as linked, and probably connected to organised crime.
For hours after the shooting, the area swarmed with ambulances, police cars and fire engines. Police guarded two black-clad men with their hands bound on the footpath, until they were led away just after 7pm.
More officers stood beside the ute, which was sitting at an intersection with all its doors open. The passenger window and both passenger-side wheels had been shot out. The vehicle was surrounded by rubbish and shattered glass.
The attack occurred under the M4 overpass, near the Vauxhall Inn and several car dealerships, including the Mercedes-Benz and Porsche Parramatta showrooms. There was heavy traffic, and people were urged to avoid the area.
Abhay Sachdeva lives about 100 metres away from the shooting scene. He said sirens began wailing about 6pm. “There were cops everywhere, and no-one knew what happened,” he said. He learnt it was a shooting from the news.
This shooting breaks the pattern of gangland attacks in Sydney. Most involve drive-by shootings of a home, or shootings of targets in secluded or suburban streets late at night. This was in the early evening, on a busy arterial road.
Police Minister Yasmin Catley said she was “horrified by the level of violence we have seen on our streets tonight”.
“I understand the community is concerned and rightly so. I want to assure them that police are working around the clock to identify and arrest those responsible,” she said in a statement on Sunday night.
Police guard a man in handcuffs near the scene of Sunday night’s shooting Credit: Angus Dalton
Police believe that at least two people were involved in the attack; a typical gangland shooting involves one trigger man and one driver, beyond those involved in the planning. One line of inquiry will be whether the car was bugged.
After several years of relative calm, Sydney has seen two other shootings, one fatal, in the past week.
John Versace, 23, was executed in the driveway of his Condell Park home by a masked and hooded gunman on Monday night; on Wednesday night, a drive-by shooting at nearby Mount Pritchard resulted in no damage to property and left nobody hurt.
Police sources say investigators are not treating Sunday night’s shooting as linked to the murder of Versace.