Mustafa Naaman shot dead as people exit Hurstville Civic Centre boxing match

Police are wondering why Mustafa Naaman was targeted by masked assassins outside the Hurstville Civic Centre on Saturday night.

Cut down in a hail of bullets in front of hundreds of terrified onlookers, Mustafa Naaman has become the latest casualty in a series of bloody shootings claiming innocent lives in the city’s south.

His grieving family, like police investigators, are now left to wonder why he was targeted by masked assassins who left a second man fighting for life in hospital.

Naaman, 29, and a younger man, believed to be a relative, were shot by handgun-wielding hit men in Hurstville on Saturday night moments after a boxing match finished in the nearby civic centre.

The pair were getting into a white Mercedes sometime between 10.30pm and 11pm when the bullets shattered the rear windshield and pierced the glass of a nearby hatchback.

Mustafa Naaman was cut down in a hail of targeted gunfire on a street in Hurstville. Picture: Facebook

The assassins fled and have not been identified.

A witness told The Daily Telegraph he heard bullets whiz past as he stepped outside after the boxing match.

“It’s so brazen,” he said.

“There were like 200 witnesses. I thought it was a .22, just going ‘clink, clink, clink’.”

The witness was among the hundreds who had taken in the bout between Billy Dib and Joey Baylon with the crowd only beginning to funnel on to the street when chaos erupted, he said.

The witness did not know if the shot men had attended the boxing match and police say there’s no suggestion the event was linked to the shooting.

Harrowing footage from the scene shows one man inside the car being hauled out and placed onto a paramedic bed as a police officer holds pressure to his chest.

A car with bullet holes and broken windows being taken away from the crime scene. Picture: Adam Yip

“You’re gonna make it,” another man is heard saying in the background. “Breathe brother, breathe.”

The bloodstained white Mercedes was towed away just before lunch yesterday, leaving a trail of crimson gauze and shattered glass on the bitumen.

Detective Superintendent Tony Cooke said the shooting was clearly a targeted hit and that police would find who was responsible.

“Two men were entering a vehicle when they were ambushed by a number of males, a number of shots were fired,” he said. “We have a significant body of police working on this.”

Naaman was known to police but investigators are now working to piece together the killers’ motivation. There is no suggestion either he or the man in hospital were linked to organised crime.

The city’s south is again becoming familiar with underworld bloodshed some four years after it hosted the gang wars that gave rise to Bassam Hamzy’s infamous Brothers For Life.

Supt Cooke say there is nothing “at this stage” linking Naaman’s death to another Hamzy-related conflict — the current clash with the formidable Alameddine family.

Police fear rivalry between the families has turned to all- out war since Hamzy’s brother, Mejid, was gunned down in October last year.

Friends and prominent members of south Sydney’s Islamic community posted tributes with one describing Naaman as an “innocent” expectant father gunned down in inexcusable violence.

“Rivalry, justified or not, used to be settled with hand to hand combat,” The Muslim Realist wrote in a tribute.

“Now, cowardice and jahiliyah (ignorance) reign supreme and manliness is judged by who is the most cunning at firing a gunshot at his opponent, getting away and covering his tracks.”