Police will play the long game in solving Sydney’s gangland murders

A new generation of smarter, richer underworld figures is making life hell for police trying to solve the spate of Sydney gangland killings over the past two years.

With 13 dead and counting, the process of solving gangland murders is now stretching out to years, thanks to a code of silence and a generation of crims wising up.

Sydney’s bloody gangland war has claimed more than a dozen lives in two years, which is a fact not lost on police who are using every technique in the book in their efforts to put the killers behind bars.

But of the 13 killings linked to the extended feud between Hamzy and Alameddine families, only one case has so far resulted in murder charges.

“Police can’t be on every street every minute of the day,” NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said after Comanchero boss Tarek Zahed and his brother were shot while leaving the Bodyfit Gym in Auburn on the night of Tuesday, May 10.

Omar died at the scene while Tarek survived despite sustaining 10 gunshot wounds.

The new generation of underworld heavyweights is getting smarter.

Take key Alameddine clan member Masood Zakaria for example. He was so spooked that police were watching him he spoke with associates from under a blanket in his garden.

After going on the run in December 2021, he stowed away on a ship to Lebanon with multiple criminal cases still before the courts.

“The technology they have now compared to even 10 years ago is incredible,” one former investigator who did not want to be named said.

“There is such an ease with which they communicate about terrorism, murder and illicit substances,” Sydney Institute of Criminology director Dr Carolyn McKay added. “People can, and do, go dark.

“They can be doing their communications about these things on the dark web. The cyber space is a real lawless land, there are no borders and who has jurisdiction is fraught.”

In most of the gangland hits to have rocked Sydney, one or more stolen cars were used to get away from the scene, then promptly found burned out in a nearby suburb.

That lack of crucial DNA evidence has left police with little to go on in the majority of these hits.

Tarek Zahed survived an attempt on his life. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca De Marchi

The best they can hope for in this scenario is that the car was reported stolen in the weeks before the shooting and the thieves were caught on camera.

The fatal Easter Show stabbing of Uati ‘Pele’ Faletolu, 17, in April, is another crime baffling investigators.

Despite dozens of mobile phones capturing the melee and aftermath, no one has come forward to identify who wielded the knife and those police have spoken to are not co-operating.

The lack of ready information is forcing police to go back to the long game, a form of Detective work that involves piecing together hours of grainy CCTV footage, bugging properties, and, in recent cases, using undercover operatives and turnover witnesses.

Police also have to deal with continuously shifting goalposts.

At first the original narrative to the murders was that they were all to do with the apparent war between the Hamzy and Alameddine families.

But that all changed when police revealed they believed exiled ex-Comanchero bikie boss Mark Buddle was behind the October 2020 murder of Mejid Hamzy, and the Alameddine dispute was not a motive for this killing.

It’s the difficulty investigators face on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

Mejid Hamzy, Bilal Hamze, Ghassan Amoun, Mahmoud Ahmad and Tarek Zahed were all warned about a bounty on their heads in the time leading up to their executions.

And then there’s the money.

Police believe Mark Buddle was behind the 2020 murder of Mejid Hamzy.

Police who have worked over several generations of gangland feuds say criminals today are richer than ever. More access to funds means the seven-figure bounties on some in the underworld is just a drop in the ocean to Sydney’s drug lords.

Lebanon-based Masood Zakaria was technically unemployed but owned a plush six-bedroom property in Greystanes and a flash car.

Bassam Hamzy has been incarcerated for over 20 years yet somehow was planning to develop a multimillion-dollar resort in the Caribbean from his Supermax cell.

Several of the Alameddine-clan live in fortress-like properties fitted with every modern security feature on the market.

Police say they need a bigger budget, with extra resources and what has been dubbed “super task forces”.

Premier Dominic Perrottet last month announced bikie busting Strike Force Raptor would get an extra 30 officers and that police would get help in another form.

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the national agency rarely involved on the ground at such a local level, is now assisting NSW Police in investigating the spate of gangland murders.

The Commission’s help will be vital, because it can compel someone to give evidence even if it will incriminate them.

If they don’t answer they can be locked up indefinitely until they talk for being in contempt.

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