Sydney ganglands’ access to high-powered weapons leaves NSW Police on edge
Updated ,first published
A dark joke is circulating in law enforcement. Question: How do you get guns into Sydney? A: Hide cocaine imports.
On Saturday afternoon, the barrel of a high-powered rifle, possibly an SKS with a modified 30-round magazine, was seen sticking out of a car window in the southwest part of the city. A hooded man fired more than two dozen shots into the glass façade of an event hall where the funeral of a 24-year-old gangster was to be held.
The shooting at Punchbowl’s Diamond Venues was more than just the latest in a long-running tit-for-tat fight between two gangs competing against the city’s drug market and avenging their losses.
This also shows that the underworld is willing and able to use military-grade weapons in broad daylight against the families and friends of their enemies.
Two senior police officers said independently: reporter If the Bondi Beach attackers had used some of the weapons available in the underworld there would have been 100 dead; This refers to a mass shooting in which alleged Islamic State terrorists killed 15 people using straight-pull bolt-action rifles and shotguns.
No one was harmed at Lorenzo Lemalu’s funeral on Saturday night, but his family quickly canceled the gathering.
Police arrested a 17-year-old boy, who cannot be named due to his age, and a 23-year-old named Ronald Donovan on Tuesday.
According to the police statement, officers seized an “assault rifle magazine” during the arrests, with no mention of the gun being seized.
Both were charged with discharging the weapon and participating in organized criminal activity. Donovan was denied bail and will remain in custody until August.
Lemalu, the leader of the so-called Coconut Cartel, was gunned down outside a Ho Chi Minh City restaurant last month amid a bloody gang war with the cartel’s former allies, the Alameddine organized crime network (OCN).
Authorities have not yet determined who ordered Lemalu’s killing but are investigating the possibility that it was revenge ordered by a third group, known as Badger OCN, after police seized a 390 kilogram shipment of meth during cartel operations in Sydney.
Mourners instead gathered at Forest Lawn Memorial Park on Sunday to bury Lemalu, under heavy police surveillance and the threat of another shooting.
Lemalu, who is also a drill rap aspirant, had just been lowered into his grave on Sunday when an account linked to Sydney underworld rap posted a picture of two military rifles and ammunition on a gray sheet of paper.
Rap fans online speculated whether the image was of the weapon used in the Punchbowl attack, a modified Soviet-era SKS, or a variant of the infamous and similar AK-47 assault rifle.
The gun in the gray sheet also featured a curved “banana magazine” magazine that could carry dozens of high-powered rounds.
Military rifles, including SKS, magazines and silencers have been seized in Sydney in recent years due to the execution of search warrants.
Just 12 days before the Bondi Beach shooting, police searched a commercial property in Kingsgrove and found an AR15 assault rifle, an SKS, a pistol, approximately 30 3D printed high capacity pistol magazines, ammunition and numerous 3D printed slides and pistol frames.
Detectives investigating the case stopped a van in Narellan the same day and found a sports bag containing a collapsible semi-automatic rifle, more banana magazines, magazines and a silencer.
Two months earlier, another strike force had busted a gang with an SKS, three magazines, 76 bullets, brass knuckles, capsicum spray and $300,000 worth of MDMA.
Gangsters in Sydney have several methods of obtaining their weapons: printing 3D components, stealing legally owned weapons, or bringing in high-powered weapons in shipping containers, as with their drugs.
Authorities arrested a Merrylands man in October 2020 after Australian Border Force found parts of an AR-15 assault rifle inside a Bluetooth speaker imported from the United States. This led them to a sprawling drug and weapons operation in the west of the city.
In April this year, police tracked down a folding, single-shot pistol belonging to a drug dealer who had a cache of weapons in Telopea.
NSW Police has refused to disclose the number of SKS rifles registered in NSW. However, a document released under a freedom of information request in 2020 suggests there are 128 variants of the rifles known to be in the possession of dealers and collectors in the state.
The Violence Policy Center in the United States called the SKS “a threat to society” and said the predecessor of the infamous AK-47 posed a “serious threat” to law enforcement.
“From 1988 to 2021, 27 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty with SKS assault rifles,” the center wrote in a report. “In six of these incidents, bullets from SKS rifles were known to penetrate police officers’ vests.”
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