A melbourne based bikie boss gunned down. Tarek Zahed and his brother Omar. Tarek Zahed is in a critical condition at Westmead Hospital.
His brother Omar left dead at the scene. So Tuesday night about 830 phones all around Sydney’s underworld were lighting up.
I started getting calls. You started getting calls? Another shooting this time that the targets were big names.
Tarik Zahed, the sergeant at arms of the Comanchero bikie gang. Australia’s most powerful criminal organisation, according to some and his brother Omar.
So they were at the gym in Auburn on busy Parramatta Road in western Sydney.
It’s about 8:00, 805. Exactly. Standing in the foyer. Two gunmen have pulled up outside, jumped out and unloaded.
We believe around 20 shots into the floor of the gym, through the windows, smashing it all up, but hitting Tariq and I’m on now.
Tariq was shot ten times, pretty much everywhere. Body, head, stomach, arms, legs and even through the eye.
That shot to his head, we believe, came in the eye. On our arrival, we found two male patients approximately 25 to 30 years of age with multiple gunshot wounds to multiple regions of their bodies.
But miraculously, he has been taken to hospital and to this point is still alive, although we’re not sure exactly what kind of condition he is in.
But Omar died at the scene. He had a heart attack. He was also a Comanchero like Tarek.
And had just got out of jail last year like a number of victims – Brownie.
He only just got out of jail. What surprised? I think we talked about the bounty that had been placed on Tarek’s head.
And I think, you know, Tarek has been you know, a lot of people just said that he had you know, he was a target for for a year or two.
I got to admit, I never thought that anyone would have the balls to knock off the sergeant of arms, soon to possibly be the president and close associate of Mark Buddle’s to take him out.
I was and I think it shocked a lot of people. Well, we talk a lot about Mark Buddle because he’s this massive international drug kingpin.
He just, you know, is a massive deal internationally. He just happens to be Australian.
He’s a Sydney boy and he’s a former Comanchero. But in he’s been living overseas for a number of years.
But in New South Wales it’s really been characterised by and so hasn’t it when it comes to the Comancheros.
Yeah. He literally everybody knows that he and battles are close and Tarek is and he’s a big figure.
Tarik was a very big figure. He was physically imposing. I love the fancy clothes and the bling, you know, he loved his designer designer clothes.
So he was he became quite a figure. So who would want to kill him?
Well, you know. Least as long as you’re armed really. That’s right. You know, any any any figures such as the sergeant at arms of the Comanchero, who are involved in a number of conflicts, major drug dealing.
Now, added to that, there’s an internal battle going on because the national presidency spot seems to be vacated.
And Tarek was considered the prime runner for that. So could there be somebody there quietly ambitious that maybe wanted Tarek out of the way or was it, you know, he’s been linked to rumours of drug reps.
Yep. That again could have made him a target. There’s also the fact that the lone wolf have lost their leader, Eric, and that there’s a bit of a vacuum there.
And a number had supposedly gone over to patched over to the Comanchero and maybe that led to a disgruntled lone wolf thinking that they’re stealing, they have their club.
So. I mean, the day before this shooting happened, we wrote a story in the paper about, you know, intelligence that police had gathered between Bassem Hamzy, who’s a massive figure in New South Wales crime, and his brother guess an American who was gunned, gunned down earlier year in January.
And intelligence police had about, you know, potential threats to target from them. Now, they were a little while ago.
So but it just goes to show that this isn’t a new phenomenon when it comes to terror.
The threats aren’t new. There was talk that Omar, his brother, was involved in a brawl at the cross on the Saturday night, which, you know, wouldn’t have led to the shooting within days, you’d imagine, because this, again, was a very well, you know, it seemed to be quite a well organised hit there.
Two stolen cars, high end cars. The one thing a lot of people are asking is why did Tarik just keep going to that gym?
I think he’d been told that there were people had told him, change up your your routine.
You know, it’s basics one eye, one for if you’ve got a target on your on your head.
Nice keep doing the same thing. But he did. Yeah, exactly. And like you said, we spoke to people in the hours after he’d been shot who they were almost angry that he hadn’t listened to them.
They told him to change his routine. I said, you know, don’t people know which gym you go to change it up?
And he hadn’t listened. But that’s nothing new. So we sit here today talking about Tarek Zahed and what Omar Zahed been killed.
But we sat here two weeks ago talking about Mahmoud Brownie Ahmed, who was gunned down in Greenacre in western Sydney.
Another massive gangland figure we’d written about having a bounty on his head. Yeah, and same thing with him.
You know, police have warned him, told him to go overseas, his mates, and told him to change the kind of car driven because everybody knew what he drove and they could spot him a mile off where that arrogant or ignorant.
Yeah, he didn’t do it. And it’s now cost two men their lives in the past fortnight and 12 people their lives in the past two years.
So the interesting thing now is what everyone’s talking about is what will happen now.
You’ve got two high profile figures in Tarek and Omar who have been shot. One killed close associates of Mark Buddle’s.
Now, everyone would expect he will come out guns blazing to try and avenge the shooting.
But if it’s internal, I think you’ll find the guns will be silent. So Omar’s death is the 12th that we’ve seen in the past two years, linked to gangland crime on Sydney’s streets.
It’s just rising and rising. But there’s a common thing with almost every single one, isn’t there?
Well, it started with Ferris AbiNader, a common former Comanchero, shot dead outside his house.
He was very close associates of Mick Hawi, former boss of the Comanchero, believed to be going over to the Bandido.
And so with all these shootings, a common thread is the Comanchero right up until the shooting on Tuesday of two Comanchero.
So up until then they were the ones believed to be behind the shootings. And the intelligence was suggesting and now somebody has hit back.
And one of the biggest issues for police has been the fact that the Comanchero were already a massive organisation in their own right.
But in recent years they’ve joined up with the Element and Crime Network, which has become a name that we’ve written about.
I couldn’t tell you how many hundreds of times the. Merging of these two groups is really a major problem, not just for the police, but for their rivals.
Like the Hamzys, wiped out almost. Let’s face it, the Ahmed’s a once very, very powerful family and no longer is anywhere near who they were.
There are still some other families out there keeping a low profile, as you would, but you wonder when there’ll be a and perhaps those families on the outer might join together because they’re getting squeezed by this almost this conglomerate, this monolith of the Comanchero and the Alameddines, you know, quite frightening combination.
