Weapons made for the battlefield
Bikie gangs are arming themselves with the same assault rifles used by Islamic State terrorists as police brace for bloody turf wars.
3D-printed sub-machineguns, silencers and homemade handguns are among weapons seized by authorities as the number of illegal guns confiscated from bikies doubled in a year, latest figures reveal.
The crackdown comes amid a spate of shootings across the country, including the attack at a Sydney gym on Comanchero boss Tarek Zahed and his brother Omar, and the shooting of former Mongol
Suleiman “Sam” Abdulrahim at a Melbourne funeral.
Detective Superintendent Jason McArthur, of the AFP’s national anti-gangs squad, said he was concerned about the guns that were in the hands of bikies.
“We found a cache of weapons, which included a Chinese copy of an AK-47 rifle … the kind of weapon that would be used by the Islamic State, the kind of weapon that’s designed purely for the battlefield,” he told the Bikies Inc podcast.
“A 30-round magazine, fully automatic, and those ones for what we would term as a seven-six-two short, a 7.62mm military round. It’s probably as bad as you can get.”
Police have stepped up their efforts to remove guns from bikies, with intelligence from the ANOM app sting helping them find hidden stashes of weapons.
More than 12,000 criminals were on the app because they thought it was encrypted, however, it was secretly monitored by the AFP and the FBI.
Intercepted messages
revealed how bikies plotted to attack each other, which police said debunked the myth of the “bikie brotherhood”.
Superintendent McArthur said there was no “brotherhood” among bikies, who were now also likely to be working with international drug lords from Mexico and Asia.
“In the last 10 to 15 years, that brotherhood has just been shown to be absolutely not applicable anymore,” he said.
Michael Phelan, chief executive of the Australian
Criminal Intelligence Commission, told the podcast: “The brotherhood thing is just a myth. At the end of the day, they are just a group of criminals that work together every now and again and human life and the individuals that work for them are expendable.”
Superintendent McArthur revealed new details of how a plot to shoot up a suburban cafe, with a gunman planning to fire from the back of a motorcycle, was foiled.
He said the cafe plot carried serious risk to the public.
“We’re talking about a weapon that you pull the trigger and 30 rounds a second towards unsuspecting people,” he said.
“The cafe itself could be filled with anyone, you know, children, and that did not factor into any of that planning at all. They just wanted to make a statement.”
More than 800 people were arrested as a result of the information gleaned from the ANOM app, including dozens of Comanchero bikies.