A nine-year-old girl was gunned down outside her Sydney house by ruthless gangsters who had turned up looking for her father.
The shocking incident took place as the youngster was helping bring grocery bags inside her house – with the girl’s mother braving a hail of bullets to drag her bleeding daughter inside.
The pair of assassins were contracted to kill the girl’s father, who was involved in a drug syndicate, and when he wasn’t there one of them stepped out of their BMW and opened fire on an unsuspecting group of children, The Saturday Telegraph reported.
It was shortly after 5.30pm on July 8, 2022 when the gunman stood at the end of the driveway and fired five shots at the group, who were standing near the front door.
One bullet hit the girl in the hip and exited the other side.
The girl’s mother, who was inside packing away the groceries, saw her daughter drop to the ground through the glass door and raced outside to her aid as the shots continued.
The mother said her daughter was ‘unresponsive’ and paramedics rushed her to Sydney Children’s Hospital for emergency surgery. She survived but went through a year of rehabilitation and now has a limp and uses an ileostomy bag.
The incident, one of the most appalling in the gang war that has played out in Sydney in recent years, was revealed after hired gun, Hassan Osseli, 24, pleaded guilty to two charges last week.
A nine-year-old girl was shot during Sydney’s gang war with her mother braving the hail of bullets to drag her inside the house
The girl was helping with the groceries when she was struck in the the hip
The two hired killers were looking for her father and fled in a BMW which they set fire to
Osseli had intended to contest the charges of shooting with intent to murder and conspiracy to murder but changed his plea.
His co-offender Mahmoud Rizk, 36, in 2023 pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder and causing grievous bodily harm and was sentenced to 12 years jail.
A gag order had been in place preventing reporting on the incident until both cases were finalised.
The pair left behind a trail of evidence which led detectives to them.
After fleeing and setting fire to the BMW, they had intended to switch cars to a Mini Cooper which had been parked in a nearby street for days.
That car wouldn’t start.
Instead they fled on foot into bushland as police scoured the area in a helicopter.
Police later found the Mini with bottles of petrol, Windex and bleach inside, along with a lighter that had DNA from Rizk on it.
A balaclava, pistol and mobile phone were found days later at parklands in the southern Sydney suburb of Oatley.
The phone contained an encrypted chat in which the two hired guns discussed the hit with a third person.
Police found bottles with petrol and bleach in a second car parked nearby
A gun was also found discarded in parklands at Oatley
Hassan Osseli, 24, pleaded guilty to intent to murder and conspiracy to murder
In the encrypted chat, the third person told the pair to be sure they had a clean shot and that the target was a ‘fat f**k’ who couldn’t ‘move quick’.
Went the hit went awry one of the pair wrote in the chat that the father ‘wasn’t even there’ and they ‘shot some fat kid’.
‘Did u hit the kid?’ the third person replied.
‘How the f**k did this happen?’
Rizk was arrested in Oatley on the night of the shooting and Osseli was arrested about ten days later.
Osseli will return to court for sentencing on February 26.
