Canberra Comanchero Axel Sidaros should be found not guilty, defence barrister argues
Police and prosecutors have failed to prove a Comanchero bikie took part in a failed alleged hit job, his lawyer has told a Supreme Court jury.
Canberra Star
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A jury would not “in a million years” find Comanchero bikie Axel Sidaros guilty of taking part in a failed hit job on the gang’s former chapter president Peter Zdravkovic, his lawyer says.
In closing submissions in the ACT Supreme Court, Sidaros’s barrister, Ian McLachlan, said the prosecution had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that his client took part in the attempted murder of Mr Zdravkovic.
“Our submission is that the Crown bears the onus (of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt), it’s a massive hurdle … the submission that I’ll ultimately be making is that you won’t get within a million miles of that state of satisfaction,” he said.
Sidaros has pleaded not guilty to a string of charges, including attempted murder and arson, and denies being one of the four masked men who started a shootout with Zdravkovic at his Calwell house before setting fire to his cars.
The prosecution case is that there was a rift among the Canberra chapter of the Comanchero bikie gang, and Mr Zdravkovic affronted his rivals by distributing photos of him burning his gang colours.
Mr McLachlan said most of the prosecution case was not in issue.
“It is fundamentally clear, beyond question, … that there was no doubt hostilities and aggression as between Mr Zdravkovic and his faction and the Comanchero faction,” he said.
But Mr McLachlan said the evidence linking Sidaros to the attempted hit job was weak.
Mr McLachlan said no eyewitnesses implicated Sidaros — the only person to be charged.
He said police “threw the net out and they threw it out far and wide”.
One of the masked men pictured in Zdravkovic’s home security camera footage is wearing what appear to be work boots, similar to a pair seized at Sidaros’s house.
Mr McLachlan said Sidaros, a carpenter, owning a pair of workboots proved nothing.
He said the only way “at all” the jury could find Sidaros guilty would be to believe the evidence of a former inmate at Canberra’s jail, the Alexander Maconochie Centre, Zachary Froome, who said Sidaros confessed his role in the alleged hit job while behind bars.
Mr McLachlan said the jury “wouldn’t … in a million years” accept Mr Froome as a “witness of truth”.
He said accepting a suggestion that the gun one of the men was holding in poorly-lit video footage of the attack would be “literally jumping at shadows”.
The jury is expected to begin deliberations on Tuesday.