Abuzar Sultani: Hitman’s texts and thoughts on Sydney murders

A Sydney uni student thought he was too meticulous for police to uncover his secret identity as a hitman responsible for five murders. But officers were watching.

Master’s student Abuzar Sultani thought he was too meticulous for police to uncover his secret identity as a hitman and gang leader responsible for five murders.

Politely spoken and scoring distinctions in his degree at Macquarie University, he never drank, smoked or did drugs and supported charities in his parents’ homeland of Afghanistan.

At the same time, aged in his mid 20s, he headed a disciplined criminal syndicate that sold drugs, guns and carried out the murder of gangland figures.

Abuzar Sultani, now 35, has pleaded guilty to his fifth murder.

Sultani himself pulled the trigger in the executions of Michael Davey, Mehmet Yilmaz and personal enemy Pasquale Barbaro all within the space of eight months in 2016.

He has now also pleaded guilty to the murder of Rebels bikie Mark Easter, whose body was found in 2015 with four bullet wounds to the back of his head.

Covert police operations eventually led to his gang’s downfall in 2016, and he has since been handed three life sentences without parole for his crimes.

The boasting texts

Sultani’s crew used Phantom Secure BlackBerry phones to communicate with each other at arm’s length of any prying police trying to intercept their messages.

It took years and a trip to Canada for the cops to finally obtain these messages after seizing some of the encrypted phones on arresting the gang in November 2016.

The police ultimately uncovered texts sent on the fly during hits, which showed how Sultani and his men boasted about their deadly exploits.

Sydney underworld identity Pasquale Barbaro.

Michael Davey was another of Sultani’s victims.

On November 14, 2016, Sultani and his men pulled off the sophisticated execution of Barbaro outside construction figure George Alex’s Earlwood home.

There is no suggestion Mr Alex was involved in any wrongdoing.

A court found the hitman had been waiting for an opportunity to kill Barbaro, who he believed had been responsible for the murder of Sultani’s friend and mentor Joe Antoun.

Three days later, Sultani, under the codename “unconfirmed”, was texting one of his inner circle about news reports that police were redoubling efforts to crack a string of underworld murders.

He said four of the eight gangland slayings being probed by a new strike force “were us”. They were the deaths of Barbaro, Yilmaz, Davey and Easter.

“Let’s survive this strike force so we can tell our grandkids hahaha,” he wrote.

“We shook Sydney bro.

“And no one even know [sic] it.”

Mark Easter was a member of the Rebels bikie gang, as was Michael Davey.

Sultani was confident police would not be able to trace the shootings back to him.

He talked about how police could only lay charges over one murder out of five during a previous spate of gangland deaths in 2012.

“Only one … and that’s going [to] trial,” he wrote.

“But they spoke in front of bugs … and they aren’t as smart as us.

“We just got to be very careful and smart.”

On November 23, he told an associate the Barbaro shooting was “my best”.

“If we pull this off no one has done it like us.”

Sultani's student card for Macquarie University.

On the 25th of November, the tone in Sultani’s messages had changed slightly after a report in The Daily Telegraph about a lead on “fly in, fly out bikie hit men”.

“Damn we really f***ed s*** up with this pb [Pasquale Barbaro] lol,” he wrote to another associate.

The friend responded: “Yeh I red [sic] it bro it is what it is maybe now I change my mind about what I said last night getting knocked lol jail more likely.”

Sultani said the group just had to be careful but added they “have [the] best lawyers worst case”.

Abuzar Sultani leaving his apartment on the night Michael Davey was shot dead.

Police did not have these text messages when Sultani and his crew were arrested on November 29, 2016.

But they had been tracking their movements with bugs in their cars and hidden cameras placed in the group’s unofficial headquarters – Sultani’s apartment at Sydney Olympic Park.

The cameras captured the squad going to and from the building on the night of the murders of Yilmaz, Davey and Barbaro, and their movements were pieced together via CCTV throughout Sydney.

Undercover operatives had also organised to buy guns and drugs from Sultani’s men in the months leading up to the sweeping arrests.

Sultani was known as “the boss” within his crew, and a court heard the “clean freak” wielded such influence that they followed his lead in only eating fillet-o-fish burgers at McDonalds and sitting down while urinating at his home.

The death Sultani regrets

In 2013, low-level drug dealer Nikola Srbin was fatally beaten by a group of men who assembled at a Redfern unit complex at the orders of Sultani.

Mr Srbin, 18, had unwittingly got himself caught up with Sultani after being part of a serious assault on a drug runner the gangster was supplying.

The drug runner, known as Witness A, contacted his “boss” and set up Mr Srbin by luring him to a meeting.

Sultani was present and armed with a gun while his cronies ambushed the teenager, who later died from severe head injuries.

Nikola Srbin was 18 when he was fatally bashed.

It was not meant to end that way, Sultani later told a psychologist from behind bars.

“[T]his case was different … this was not meant to happen … he was not supposed to die and I felt bad and want to say sorry to the family … there was no plan … the plan was to confront them and that was it … it all happened so fast.”

Sultani was then a Rebels nominee and was at the time setting up a clubhouse for a new chapter at Burwood. He and his clubmates later broke away from the Rebels to operate independently.

Abuzar Sultani during his time in the Rebels.

He pleaded guilty to Mr Srbin’s murder in late 2022, and told the psychologist it was unrelated to the gangland killings he would later commit.

“[I]n the end a young person has lost his life and I am responsible for my actions and if I did not enable it to happen he would not have died … after that I made some bad decisions,” he said.

“I went more under the radar and got into that murky world of criminality … it led to making more bad decisions … I now realise if you make a mistake you have to own up to it and face it.”

Sultani also shed light on how he felt about the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison: “If I died tomorrow that would be OK.”

He will appear before the Supreme Court next week as part of sentencing proceedings for the Easter murder.

Originally published as Abuzar Sultani: Hitman’s texts and thoughts on Sydney murders