How shaken suburbs are grappling with gang wars and innocent victims

Ahmad Hraichie has buried many gangsters in his time as a Muslim undertaker. He’s buried small time runners, heads of crime families and everyone in between.

He knows death and its sudden movements well. But even he is shaken by the escalating gangland violence in western Sydney.

“There were rules before: you don’t shoot innocent people, you don’t shoot kids or women, you don’t shoot at funerals,” he says. “It’s wild now, there are no rules.”

“Yeah, it’s gangsters, but gangsters once had ethics and morals and integrity. They’d help an old lady on the street.

“Now it’s brazen, it’s lawless, like the Wild West.”

Hraichie is speaking at the Muslim morgue under Lakemba Mosque where Louis Meehan was washed and prepared for burial on Saturday, as per the strict Islamic protocols on death.

A body must be washed, wrapped in a white shroud, prayed over and buried as soon as possible, part of a broader Islamic belief in death being a transition from life to the afterlife. Delays are seen as holding the soul back from moving to the next phase of existence.

Meehan was shot dead behind his boxing gym in the Punchbowl Community Centre car park on Wednesday night, as community members and school students watched on.

He died under a hail of gunfire from an assailant who fled in a silver Lexus. Police believe the attack is linked to organised crime in western Sydney. Meehan had posted photos online wearing merchandise linked to the Alameddine crime gang, which is locked in a murderous war with rival gang the Coconut Cartel.

Meehan’s killing was the third in a little over a week. University student Marco Tapia, 23, was shot dead in his bed in Glen Alpine on Tuesday last week. The next day, Joshua Macdonald, 40, was shot in the doorway of a Merrylands West home. Two men were arrested on Friday in connection with that shooting, including an alleged drone operator.

In the two years to June, 19 people died amid escalating violence, a Herald analysis found, including 100 shootings and 52 firebombings.

The violence has coalesced into a haze that hangs over western Sydney, a dread looming over a region that has known violence before but not like this.

“It’s getting worse, and it is driven by many factors, including the intoxicating draw of social media and the internet,” Hraichie says. “It’s brazen now. People are doing it in the middle of the day, and part of that is the internet.

“The world has become so fast and people are struggling. And to these kids, it’s all about the lifestyle, the haircuts, the cars, the money. It’s all about living in this moment, right now, no future.

“It’s an alien world,” he says, shaking his head.

Like many in western Sydney, Hraichie has seen different eras of gang violence break out. There were the gangland wars of the 1980s, the postcode wars of the late 2010s, the feud between the Hamzy and Alameddine families.

With a regional robustness charged by generations of migrants from wartorn backgrounds who won’t be shaken by much, the violence remained for a while as cultural background noise, shrugged at and ignored.

But it has since spilled out into community spaces, into daylight, and into the cultural consciousness with brazen acts.

As more innocent people die than ever before, Hraichie says frustration is growing at a lack of action from authorities.

“There isn’t fear, there’s frustration,” he says. “I don’t think fear is part of the equation or vocabulary for these parts. But people are frustrated: why haven’t these guys been stopped?”

That sense of frustration hardly abated when acting Assistant Police Commissioner Grant Taylor said on Thursday that gangland shootings were “part and parcel of life in a big metropolis”.

“It always looks like crime is out of control but, when you look at it, we’re on track,” Taylor said.

“We always have about eight organised crime murders a year. We’ve had six, and then last night made seven. It’s always going to be part and parcel of life in a big metropolis; this is no different.”

The comments were swiftly shot down by Premier Chris Minns, who said the violence was shocking and the community “shouldn’t have to put up with” it.

“I’d hate it for anyone to believe that we’re accepting of the status quo, or we believe that it’s normal, or that it’s acceptable, or that we just have to turn a blind eye,” Minns said.

“I don’t think any premier or any political leader can ever make the claim or promise that murder will stop in a big state like NSW, but we can promise arrests, and we can promise longer jail time for the people who are involved.”

Criminologist Dr Vincent Hurley, who spent 23 years as a NSW Police detective, said that if the violence was not curbed soon, it could start to have lasting cultural consequences.

“The names that they adopt almost set in train this narrative that tarnishes the rest of the community,” he said.

“I think the frustration is that it seems to be every day, all day, and that’s probably not the case. And I think they find it frustrating because people stereotype them. It wears them down over time, and people can’t break away from their surname, from their culture.”

Hurley warned that without urgent intervention, communities could become insular and pull away from the rest of Sydney, culturally and economically.

“They’re going to bunker down and become very protective of themselves, and it’ll be us versus them, even if they’re not involved in any type of crime,” he said.

“Just by the mere fact of stereotyping, it’s going to have a massive effect on kids at school, who then want to go out and get a job; they probably won’t leave that geographic area. These areas will become siloed.

“Ultimately, I really feel sorry for the community members of these cultural groups because they have no control over the narrative.”

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