Abdallah Hassan Al Battat not guilty of murder after it emerges he was crying and hiding

A man accused of taking part in a contract killing been found not guilty of murder as three others went down for the crime at a Buddhist monastery.

Abdallah Hassan Al Battat one of four men accused of taking part in a contract killing, has been found not guilty after it was revealed he was crying and hid under a coffee table while the murder took place.

Al Battat, who is also known as Abs, stood trial over the murder of Qin Wu at a Guildford home that doubled as a Buddhist monastery in February 2017

Police arresting one of the men over the murder of Qin Wu.

He was the only one of the quartet who was found not guilty in the NSW Supreme Court on November 24.

At the heart of the case was a man named Jun Jia.

The court heard Jia took 1kg of methamphetamine from the gang “on tick” and then sold the drugs for $90,000 without paying the criminal syndicate the $80,000 he owed.

For this, they took out a contract to have him killed.

Police leading another of the men into a police vehicle

In January 2017, two men, Ian Fan and Ying Cheng Luo, accepted the contract, the court heard.

On January 23, Jia was shot at while sitting in traffic at the intersection of Bexley Rd and Homer St, Earlwood, but survived.

Al Battat was found not guilty of attempted murder over the shooting.

On February 1, 2017, at the Guildford house that doubled as a Buddhist monastery, a fourth man, Jaiyu Liu, attempted to shoot Jia, the court heard.

But Liu shot Qin Wu when Wu attempted to wrestle the gun from Liu’s grasp.

One of the men arrested by police.

Liu, Fan and Luo were found guilty of murdering Wu. They were also found guilty of attempting to murder Jia at Earlwood.

But Al Battat was found not guilty of murdering Wu and one of the contributing factors to his acquittal was crucial evidence given by an eye witness to the shooting who told the court the accused killer was crying and hiding near a coffee table when the murder took place.

The witness was assisting the court by telling what happened in the moments before and after the shooting.

Asked by one of the barristers in the case if Abs and another man were “both, in essence, hiding or cowering behind parts of what was in the lounge room when they came to your vicinity?”, the witness replied: “Yes”.

Immediately after the shooting, when the other man called Triple-0, the barrister asked the witness if that was the same time that you saw that Abs was in fact crying at that time?”

The witness replied: “Yeah, yeah.”

Police gathering evidence into the murder.

The witness also told the court that Abs lit an incense stick after the shooting.

“I saw Abs lit one incense stick and then he cried and (the other man) was just hiding behind me,” the witness told the court.

Liu, Fan and Luo will be sentenced on March 19.