Rising gangland figure Ahmed Al-Hamza emerges as top organised crime target
Underworld youngster Ahmed Al-Hamza’s luxury overseas lifestyle has scored him more than just status at home, it’s put him in the sights of federal law enforcement.
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Young Melbourne gangland figure Ahmed Al-Hamza has emerged as one of Australia’s top organised crime targets.
The triggerman and drug dealer is living large in Dubai where he was recently photographed smiling at the wheel of a luxury Lamborghini sports car.
That followed last year’s posting of images of Al-Hamza relaxing with Melbourne real estate industry figures in the opulent desert city.
Underworld sources say his free-spending has extended to paying for some family members to join him in the United Arab Emirates.
The Herald Sun understands the streetwise Al-Hamza is still pulling strings back home, particularly in the northern suburbs where he is suspected of remaining active in the drug trade.
Though only aged in his mid-20s, he has rapidly risen to be prominent on the radar of federal law enforcement bodies monitoring Australian criminals on foreign soil.
Dubai has over the years become a popular destination for organised crime figures from Down Under.
Two teenage suspects in last June’s funeral wounding of former Mongol bikie Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim hastily headed there in the aftermath of that ambush.
It is unclear where they are now.
The transnational nature of organised crime has meant senior underworld players have been able to exert control in Australia from foreign destinations.
The Sunday Herald Sun revealed last week that communications on the ANOM encrypted app had shown another Comanchero, Hasan Topal, was dishing out the orders from overseas in the period before the massive Operation Ironside bust of mid-2021.
Topal remains a suspect in two 2017 wrong-victim murders in Melbourne and an array of other non-fatal shootings in that period.
Before heading overseas last year, Al-Hamza had carved out a reputation as one of the most formidable players in Melbourne’s Middle-Eastern organised crime sphere.
He is extremely well-connected but has also made some dangerous enemies in the past decade, among them violent gunmen and high-level drug traffickers.
In his youth he was on good terms with the influential Marrogi family and another senior underworld figure connected to outlaw motorcycle gangs and the heroin trade
Al Hamza was living on the edge from his teenage years.
In 2016, he was shot in the leg in an ambush near the Al-Diwan restaurant in Campbellfield.
Al-Hamza was charged over the 2017 shooting of 21-year-old Anwar Teriaki in the porch of his Roxburgh Park home, later beating the case in the Supreme Court.
Al-Hamza was in 2019 busted holding weapons stolen in a major armed robbery on the O’Reilly’s Firearms store in Thornbury.
Covert police watched as he moved guns hidden in pillow cases from his Docklands apartment to an Audi vehicle.
He later told investigators that a loaded gun found in a fire hose cabinet was for his own protection.
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