Andrew Rule: The mystery of the missing bullets and a police raid gone wrong
Nobody in Victoria Police command seems interested in who made a small truckload of seized ammunition vanish like a rabbit from a hat, but when officers raided the property of a 76-year-old, they picked on the wrong man.
Andrew Rule
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Simon Oswald Gibbling is a wonderfully rare name, and he is the only Victoria Police member who answers to it. But was he the officer who directed two uniformed policemen to stack some 60,000 rounds of valuable ammunition in a grossly overloaded police car on a property near Ballarat in late 2021?
Simon Gibbling categorically states he wasn’t, which is fair enough. But the fact is that his name appears on the shoddily prepared Property Receipt handed to the owner of the guns and ammunition, and so is included on documents being prepared for a court action.
The receipt refers only to a number of firearms that the police took that day — not, conveniently, to the massive amount of ammunition that had their SUV sitting low on its springs as it left the property.
One of three police officers who loaded the guns and ammunition that day was Andrew Paulet. He and two others were sent on an ill-conceived and poorly executed mission on Friday, October 1, 2021.
The problem with what happened then and afterwards is that maybe half a tonne of expensive ammunition loaded into their blue police SUV that afternoon went missing over the next eight weeks — and is still missing.
This might well have nothing to do with any of the three policemen who seized it from its legal owner, but investigation of the loss of a citizen’s property must begin with them.
The registered guns they took that day were returned, scratched and damaged (and, outrageously, one of them loaded) late the following month.
But the owner claims that tens of thousands of rounds of valuable pistol ammunition vanished, including such rare stock as .44 magnum, .45 Colt — and .40 calibre semi-automatic, the round used in Victoria Police pistols.
All missing, states the owner.
Missing as in gone, not merely mislaid. Missing as in possibly broken up into smaller lots and disposed of. Missing as in possibly pilfered by the packet or stolen in a job lot from police “custody.”
The only realistic alternative to that scenario is that a huge amount of ammunition was left unattended in a car or somewhere similarly vulnerable where it was stolen by opportunists. Or maybe by someone who was tipped off.
Criminal negligence or barefaced theft? Take your pick.
The idea that most of a small truckload of ammunition could be genuinely “lost” by Victoria Police is almost as shocking as the more likely explanation of theft.
This is 60,000 rounds of ammunition worth far more on the black market than it was when legitimately bought, pushing up its value from a “cost” price of perhaps $40,000 to at least $140,000 on the street.
Some scarce rounds in that lot are worth $7 each at a gun shop — and much more on the black market. Then there’s the 9mm ammunition that fits many semi-automatic pistols — and also the submachine guns that gangs love using on each other.
The missing ammunition is a scandal the police force does not want to own and has tried to stare down for more than three years. And no wonder.
No one from the Chief Commissioner’s office to the cleaner at Ballarat police station appears to have any more idea about what happened to 60,000 rounds than they have about where Samantha Murphy’s body is.
There is a difference, of course. The whereabouts of poor Samantha Murphy’s remains is a genuine mystery that the force genuinely wants to solve and probably will. Whereas the fate of the ammunition (obviously known to somebody somewhere) seems to be in the “nothing to see here” basket.
Nobody in police command seems interested in who made a small truckload of seized ammunition vanish like a rabbit from a hat. Exposure would lead to charges and headlines and a sense of something unpleasant hanging over the force.
It makes for a much smaller scandal to say the seized ammunition went “uncatalogued” in the notoriously chaotic police property system than to concede it must have been stolen. This is how it has been handled so far. After an internal inquiry prompted by IBAC, an unnamed officer was counselled about poor “cataloguing” of property.
The silence from police HQ is deep and possibly meaningful. So deep that the Victorian Government Solicitor has so far not replied to a legal letter sent in January by the law firm representing the 76-year-old man whose property was grabbed on a pretext that he regards as spurious.
But it seems VicPol has picked on the wrong man, an honest one with nothing to hide. Sam Mahfoud is a retired mechanical engineer, a grandfather of nine who has worked hard, paid his taxes and been a model citizen since arriving from Syria as a teenager in 1968.
Sam Mahfoud became a keen sporting shooter, expanding from rifle and clay target shooting about 15 years ago to include target shooting with pistols.
It’s a hobby that indulged the collector instinct: like the obsessive amateur golfer always searching for “better” wedges and putters and buying “bargain” balls in bulk, Mr Mahfoud goes to sales and buys stuff that catches eye. Especially ammunition, which he can’t resist if the price is right.
His adult children no longer buy him jumpers or books for Christmas and birthdays. They know he’d rather have a credit voucher from O’Reilly’s Firearms in Thornbury.
A bargain hunter all his life, he knows that the price of certain ammunition tends to rise faster than inflation.
Because he shoots targets with a wide range of pistols (and rifles) from .22 calibre to .45 revolvers and everything in between, notably 9mm, .357 cal., .40 cal. and .38 Special, he likes to buy ammunition when it’s relatively cheap.
Sam Mahfoud’s ordeal began because of a minor financial issue with a suburban estate agent, a Chinese woman known to the family who thought she could find a buyer for a country property the Mahfouds owned near Heathcote.
The woman did not secure a sale but when Mr Mahfoud sold it through someone else, she demanded a “lost commission” of more than $9000.
He refused, offering her half that sum to leave him alone. She threatened repercussions. She then laid a bogus complaint with Broadmeadows Police, who unwittingly, or witlessly, filed an Apprehended Violence Order against the then 73-year-old grandfather.
The complainant, whose relatives were target shooters with Mr Mahfoud, knew that as soon as police checked the database, it would flag him as a registered shooter. As such, he would then automatically have guns and ammunition seized on the false pretext he was a threat.
The first Sam Mahfoud knew of this was when he got a panicked call from his wife on October 1, 2021, to say armed police had jumped over their boundary fence and were knocking on the windows.
It soon turned out the AVO (which a Victoria Police spokesman confirms was handled at the Ballarat end by Simon Gibbling) wasn’t worth the paper it was written on: when it was challenged in court, a magistrate effectively tore it up. The order was clearly an abuse of process, a form of intimidation available to any plausible liar when AVOs are virtually dispensed on request.
But none of that helped Mr Mahfoud when he got back what was left of his property. Apart from the big financial loss, he was angry that his firearms had been scratched and bashed around so that the sights were out of kilter.
Even worse, for a man who is scrupulous about safety, he saw that some fool had used one of his rifles — and had left eight live cartridges in the magazine. He had effectively been handed back a loaded rifle, a serious breach of common sense and safety rules.
A kindly Ballarat policeman helped transport the guns and the remains of his ammunition home. The guns went in one safe. The ammunition all fitted easily in another, which highlighted the extent of his loss: before the raid his ammunition stock had filled two safes.
But not all Sam Mahfoud’s anger and hurt is about the loss of the money that the ammunition represented, given its high replacement cost.
He has lost faith in the “fair go” ethos of the country he adopted as his own in 1968 as a young mechanic who knew more about engines than about English.
He comes back to this time and again.
“They jumped my fence and they shouldn’t do that,” he said. “They shouldn’t trespass — they should call and ask me to unlock the gate.”
What happened on that Friday was that police jumped the fence and walked 500m to the house, banging on windows when they got there.
Sam’s wife, Vicky, was lying down as she wasn’t well. Her two young grandchildren were frightened by the armed police and came running to her bedside.
She called Sam, who was in Ballarat. When he returned he was struck by how polite, and apparently embarrassed, two officers were — and how this contrasted with the man he calls “the detective,” who was rude and rough.
He claims none of the three introduced themselves or handed him a business card with their names, a lapse of the usual protocol.
He alleges that the detective pushed past him into the bedroom, took the key and opened the safe there and started handling the contents, instead of asking the owner to hand out each firearm as it was called from a registry list, which is the correct procedure.
Mr Mahfoud insisted they count and note the ammunition as it was removed but, he claims, the detective snapped “I don’t have time for that”.
The “detective” then gratuitously commented something like “You’ve got enough here to wipe out Al Qaeda,” a snide reference to Islamic terrorists that offended the Mahfouds, who are Christians.
What the supposed detective could not do was stop the Mahfouds from photographing boxes of ammunition being loaded into the car.
That evidence will form part of the civil action a Melbourne law firm is launching for them against Victoria Police in the County Court.
If it gets to court, police will be required to produce body-cam footage of what happened on the day of the raid — including exactly who was there.
The force’s official response (*see edited statement below) asserts that “all ammunition” was returned. The problem with that, of course, is the police actually don’t know how much was taken or returned because they didn’t count it.
*Victoria Police’s Professional Standards Command conducted an investigation into the seizure of firearms and ammunition from a Leigh Creek property on 1 October 2021. IBAC referred this matter to Victoria Police on 8 March 2022.
The investigation concluded there was no evidence to support any assertion that all ammunition seized was not returned. However, during this investigation, opportunities for improvement in record taking were identified and workplace guidance was provided.
The firearms and ammunition were seized by uniform members from Ballarat SOCIT with the assistance of Ballan Uniform members.
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