By Melissa Cunningham and Chris Vedelago
Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim was leaving a cousin’s funeral, driving in a procession outside the Fawkner cemetery, when a car swerved into the oncoming traffic lane and a gunman sprayed eight bullets into him.
Four hit Abdulrahim’s chest, while another remained lodged in his kidney after it was deemed unsafe to remove – becoming a souvenir of sorts of his many brushes with death.
The Mercedes in which Sam Abdulrahim was shot while travelling in a funeral procession in 2022.Credit: Paul Jeffers
Bloodied and injured, he was driven in his black Mercedes-Benz G-Class four-wheel-drive for half a kilometre to the nearby Fawkner police station. The shooters, meanwhile, crashed their getaway car into a fire hydrant, before carjacking a woman and child at gunpoint and fleeing in a Ford Territory.
Abdulrahim claimed he died twice before reaching the hospital that day. He spent two days in intensive care before he discharged himself.
“I thought it was one of my mates from the funeral. And when I looked, I just seen something pointing at me and I’ll go, surely this is a joke,” Abdulrahim would later tell Sam Newman’s podcast, You Cannot Be Serious.
“[Am I] walking around worried? Nah, not really. You know, when my time’s up, my time’s up, I guess.”
That attempt on his life in 2022 – suspected to have been orchestrated by Ahmed Al Hamza, a gangland figure now in the Middle East – was just one of many.
The champion boxer lived under the shadow of death threats for years, narrowly, and sometimes miraculously, escaping violent ambushes.
His notoriety earned him the title of the Melbourne underworld’s most hunted man, one who had a $1 million bounty on his head.
In 2017, Abdulrahim’s panel-beating shop in Epping was targeted in a daylight drive-by shooting.
In March 2019, he narrowly survived another drive-by shooting in Brunswick.
Months later, a shooting targeting Abdulrahim unfolded at the wrong house in Campbellfield.
In June 2019, amid police concerns about threats on his life, his parole was revoked over an earlier high-speed crash in which he slammed his speeding Ferrari 360 Spider into oncoming traffic, killing a great-grandmother and injuring 10 others.
Shortly after he arrived at Loddon Prison, he survived a prison assault by an inmate wielding a rock.
In 2022, Abdulrahim was told there would be an attempt to kill him at a boxing match.
In February last year, a Thornbury venue set to hold a boxing match in his bid for a world title was burnt down. Police also warned him there was a murder contract out on him.
In May last year, two cars belonging to Abdulrahim’s parents were set on fire outside their home in Brunswick in Melbourne’s inner north.
A few suburbs away in Thomastown, two masked men with handguns crouched below a wall running alongside Abdulrahim’s gated home – waiting for him to dash to his parents’ aid.
As the electronic driveway gate began opening, the assailants walked up to the car and opened fire. Slamming the vehicle in reverse, Abdulrahim swung through the gate as the gunshots continued to rain down.
Seventeen bullets were fired at Abdulrahim. Not one hit him.
But that attack scared him enough to lead to his going into hiding.
Weeks later, gunmen returned to Abdulrahim’s vacant home and shot into the house again, but he was nowhere to be found. He was travelling between Melbourne, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand in a bid to stay ahead of his enemies.
When his foes could not find him they started viciously targeting his family, friends and associates. Police and underworld sources suspected a series of seemingly random or unexplainable violent attacks in the past six months were linked to him.
In July last year, arsonists torched the QRoom in Thomastown, where Abdulrahim’s nephew was scheduled to fight in a boxing match.
Abdulrahmin’s burnt-out home in Thomastown in August 2024.Credit: Simon Schluter
Then in August, his empty Thomastown home and one of his relative’s Port Melbourne businesses were firebombed.
But Abdulrahim’s luck ran out on Tuesday morning.
The target of at least three murder contracts, a dozen firebombings and no fewer than seven shootings, he was slain in broad daylight in front of his girlfriend as they walked to a car in High Street in Preston.
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