Cross King’s hidden escape tunnel revealed during police operation

EXCLUSIVE: A secret subterranean passage leading from the clifftop mansion of Kings Cross nightclub tsar John Ibrahim, exiting in a public park, was uncovered during last week’s police raids, sources claim.

A secret door believed to be the exit from John Ibrahim's secret escape tunnel.

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A SECRET underground escape tunnel leading from John Ibrahim’s cliff-top mansion to a nearby public park was uncovered by police during last week’s drug raids, according to police insiders.

The sneaky passage is believed to snake from Ibrahim’s double garage, under his in-ground swimming pool and pops out on a council reserve behind his property via a hidden door.

Rumours of the tunnel began to emerge shortly after Ibrahim’s Dover Heights home was raided as part of a police operation targeting illegal drug operations on three continents.

John Ibrahim pictured at his Dover Heights home in the week after police raids.

Ibrahim escaped charges, but his brothers Michael and Fadi were locked up in Dubai while his son Daniel and girlfriend Sarah Budge were both arrested and released on bail in Sydney.

Ibrahim, who ironically began his career by buying Kings Cross nightclub The Tunnel, hints at having acces to a hidden passage in his recently released autobiography The Last King Of The X, saying he relied on alternative exits to avoid attention.

He wrote: “The police and the media are all over my shit, and I have to use different ways to leave my house and make phone calls because the surveillance is constant.”

John Ibrahim's Dover Heights home. A secret tunnel is said to run under the house.

However one close associate who claims to have seen the tunnel but asked not to be named said the famous “underground passage” was also an extra safety precaution against unwanted intruders.

The associate claims the tunnel was built in 2007, the same time Ibrahim built his swimming pool, and is hidden behind a panel in his double garage.

It also provides access to his pool filter.

The door is almost perfectly camouflaged within the grey concrete wall except for two hinges.

One way to access the tunnel from the outside is by going over the side of a public boardwalk that hugs the cliff outside Ibrahim’s home and scamper up a heavily shrubbed escarpment.

The only other way is to bush-bash up a makeshift path along Ibrahim’s neighbour’s boundary fence.

At the base of the house is a dark, narrow passage underneath thick overhanging vines, leading to the tunnel’s exit.

The door is almost perfectly camouflaged within the grey concrete wall except for two hinges, a faint outline and a key hole.

But there is no mention of the escape hatch in any of the development applications submitted to Waverley Council at the time the pool was built.

Nor is there any reference to it in any of the other six development applications submitted to council since Ibrahim purchased the house in 1997 for $1.165 million. The three-storey building, with floor to ceiling glass, now has an estimated value of $6.26 million.

The property was searched for eight hours by federal police earlier this month as part of an operation targeting organised crime and a high-profile drug-smuggling syndicate.

The raids centred on an alleged get-rich-quick tobacco-smuggling scam and a colossal criminal conspiracy to import 1.9 tonnes of MDMA, ice and cocaine.

The co-ordinated raids led by the AFP with the assistance of overseas police occurred in Sydney, Dubai and The Hague in the Netherlands.

A council spokeswoman said the council had not been notified of any tunnel at the Ibrahim residence, while a spokesman for the AFP declined to comment.