Abuzar Sultani’s safe house was filled with weapons and drugs
It was a nondescript apartment in Sydney’s Inner West but inside was an incredible stash of weapons, some of which Abuzar Sultani had used during his reign of terror. See the pictures.
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On September 1, 2016, police secretly broke into a studio apartment in Ada St, Concord, and found a jaw dropping arsenal of weaponry.
This included a semi automatic rifle hidden in a guitar case inside the lounge room cupboard.
It was one of five properties that Abuzar Sultani, sentenced to three life terms on Friday, used as a safe house to stash guns, weaponry and drugs.
In some cases, the properties were leased under the names of people whose personal details had been stolen.
Sultani employed one man to keep watch over the safe houses.
This way, the contents of the properties would not be linked back to Sultani and his crew.
The amount of weaponry inside Ada St was staggering.
Inside the cupboard next to the front door police found the AR-15 semi automatic rifle hidden inside a guitar case. It was one of 12 guns in the cupboard.
Below that was a silver toolbox containing six more guns, empty gun magazines and bullets.
Behind the toolbox was a Darrell Lea cooler bag holding four more guns.
A shotgun had been neatly slid into a gap between the shelves and the cupboard wall on the floor.
On the first shelf was a Tupperware container with about 44 bullets. It was next to a number of padlocks and garbage bags.
Underneath that, police found a five litre petrol can, a bullet crimping tool and a taser with extra cartridges.
The second shelf was the storage position for boxes containing hundreds of rounds of ammunition, allegedly stolen identity cards, while three more containers filled with methamphetamine were on the top shelf.
The cupboard had an overhead shelf where more weaponry was kept.
In a plastic Australia Post tub police found a black polymer face mask, a ballistics vest, a camouflage jacket, disposable overalls, three blue NSW Police button up shirts and a UBD map of the Central Coast.
One of the weapons on the second shelf was a homemade pen gun that was capable of firing a single shot.
Inside the Darrell Lea bag, police found a Beretta style self loading pistol, and three other firearms.
Also in the cupboard were a Browning Challenger pistol with a silencer, a .25 calibre Colt pistol, 9mm Israeli Weapons Industries Desert Eagle that Sultani told one associate was his “favourite”.
The last two guns were critical because they were the ones used to kill Michael Davey six months earlier.
Another key piece of evidence was a Census form for the Australian Bureau of Statistics found in the living room that was critical to the investigation. It had Sultani’s fingerprint on the top of the return envelope and linked him to the apartment.
Another cupboard contained a collection of fake number plates that were similar to the ones used on the cars during the murders.
An associate of Sultani agreed to give evidence to police and told investigators he supplied between 50 and 100 guns to him between 2013 and 2016.
These included .22 calibre rifles, Mach 10s, sniper rifles and AK-47s.
The man told police he also had a number of silencers made for Sultani to fit a number of handguns.
The man also told detectives Sultani personally inspected all new firearms to ensure he was happy with the quality.
All up, Sultani had five safe houses that were leased under other people’s names and used to hide his criminal tool kit.
There was a single storey housing commission home at Dundas Valley that was originally used as a meeting place for the Rebels.
Another was a shopfront on Burwood Rd Concord as was a unit in Quakers Hill.
A warehouse on George St, Hornsby, was used to hide vehicles used in the murders.
HOW THE POLICE TOOK DOWN SULTANI’S GANG
Abuzar Sultani ran down the hallway outside the gang’s apartment in Sydney Olympic Park in a scene that would be comical if it wasn’t a recreation of such a morbid scene.
It is just over one week after Sultani murdered of Pasquale Barbaro and Sultani was putting on a show for Joshusa Baines, who helped in the execution.
“What are you doing, bra?” Baines asked Sultani.
Sultani was demonstrating how he chased Barbaro down Larkhall Ave Earlwood before shooting the underworld figure at least five times on November 14, 2016.
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He was also recreating the scene to reassure himself that he hadn’t moved in a way that resulted in him being identified.
“(I) saw him,” Sultani said of Barbaro, who was sitting in his Mercedes seconds before he was shot dead in the street. “Car backed up. We’re there. Just kicking back like this. I’ll show ya. This is him.”
The conversation continued before Sultani ran down the hallway again before asking Baines: “Get what I mean?”
Baines replied: “You were ducking down anyway.”
“You remember that hey … I was like,” Sultani said before running down the hall a third time.
Baines said: “But you were pinging him like that. Like fifty fifty you know what I mean … I only really remember Boooooom!”
It didn’t matter how careful Sultani and Baines were at the murder scene.
Police were watching this entire scene unfold thanks to a secret camera that had been installed in the hallway outside the apartment.
It was pointed directly at the gang’s front door.
There was more.
Police had also broken into the apartment and installed more hidden cameras inside Sultani’s headquarters.
At 9.09pm that night it recorded Sultani and Baines sketching the murder scene at Larkhall Ave, including the positions of people, cars and streets.
The pair appeared to be arguing over the finer points of what happened that night.
At one point, when Baines said “You went that way”, Sultani was recorded at first disputing, but then agreeing to his underling’s version of events.
“I did, didn’t I,” Sultani said. “Yeah you didn’t come from that way.”
Sultani wasn’t convinced and asked; “Are you sure?”
Baines was and said: “100 per cent. I watched you.”
To say that the police had Sultani and his crew wired for sound is an understatement for the ages.
Police actually watched and listened to almost every move made by Sultani and his hit squad for the better part of a year.
It was critical to building what became an overwhelmingly strong case that forced Sultani into pleading guilty to the murders.
Police also made good use of the camera in the lift of the Australia Ave apartment building.
Each time the gang left to commit murder, they were filmed coming out of the apartment and getting into the lift.
When the group entered the lift in the hours before Mehmet Yilmaz was murdered, an eagle eyed investigator spotted that Sultani was wearing a pair of tan coloured work boots.
They were the same pair of boots worn by Sultani as he was filmed by a CCTV camera as he shot Yilmaz dead while wearing a balaclava.
Detectives were also aware of many of the cars used by Sultani’s crew.
Each of them had been fitted with a tracking device and a recording device.
So when Sultani’s crew drove their semi legitimate cars to a secret location to pick up stolen cars with fake number plates to commit the murders, police were able to follow them.
Much of the investigation was the result of exhaustive detective work.
Police became aware of the 200 acre property at Mangrove Mountain on the Central Coast where Sultani test fired a number of his weapons in February 2016.
Investigators raided the property and found the bullet casings fired by Sultani.
Ballistic experts concluded that they were fired by the same guns that killed Davey the following month.
In September 2016, Sultani told an acquaintance to use an angle grinder to break the gun used to kill Yilmaz into little pieces and then throw them in a lake.
The acquaintance dutifully cut up the gun into pieces no bigger than an inch each, which he then placed in a sandwich bag and threw into the lake at Gwandalan Lions Park on September 12, 2016.
Three years later, police divers went to the spot at the end of a long wharf on the lake and recovered a piece of the gun, which was later identified as the gun that killed Yilmaz.
When Sultani wanted to disguise a stolen car, he would have one of his gang members find a similar make and model on carsales.com.au.
The number plate of a similar car on the site would be noted and passed to a sign writer who was working for Sultani.
The sign writer then had the capability to create a large number of fake number plates for Sultani, many of which were discovered when police raided the safe houses.
Police also uncovered the method by exhaustively finding the old advertisements for all of the similar models of cars on the website.
Police also relied on several rollover witnesses, who included several former members of the gang, who agreed to give evidence against their former friends in return for a discount on their own punishments.
One of them rolled when police found the vehicle and two guns used in the Yilmaz murder being stored at a Western Sydney home.
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