Pair face life in prison for three murders of Sydney gangland rivals
Two men face life in prison for three execution murders of gang rivals, including mafioso Pasquale Barbaro and another that occurred a metre from the target’s fiancee.
Business student Abuzar Sultani and housemate Siar Munshizada’s three murder convictions can be revealed after the New South Wales court of criminal appeal on Thursday lifted suppression orders covering the case.
The men, aged 32 and 33, were active and high-ranking members of a Rebels bikie gang chapter when they committed a string of murders across Sydney in 2016.
Rebels enforcer Michael “Ruthless” Davey, described by his father, William, last week as the victim of a “cowardly aggressive and sickening” murder, was shot dead in the driveway of his home in Kingswood on 30 March 2016.
Munshizada’s sentence hearing heard the motive for the execution may have been a contract killing or to eliminate a rival.
“You abandoned Michael on the footpath, where he drew his last breath,” William Davey told Munshizada during the sentence hearing in the NSW supreme court.
“Like the rats to rotten cheese, you scurried away to your vehicle.”
Next was Comanchero associate Mehmet Yilmaz, gunned down at close range on 9 September 2016.
Munshizada and Sultani waited in a car until Yilmaz emerged on to Brisbane Street in St Marys, approaching him and firing at him.
Yilmaz’s partner was a metre from him when he was shot and has been left with “lifelong, debilitating effects … so profound as to amount to an aggravating circumstance”, the crown submitted.
While Munshizada has argued he was a “foot soldier” under Sultani’s spell and duped by the younger man’s facade as a successful businessman, the crown said he was Sultani’s lieutenant who saddled up for a third execution in November 2016.
Pasquale Barbaro, a Sydney mafioso whose namesake cousin was executed alongside Jason Moran in Melbourne in 2003, was shot as he stepped into his Mercedes in Earlwood on 14 November.
Munshizada was again at the wheel, this time of a stolen Audi. According to the Crown, his driving was “precise” as the back seat of the Audi aligned with the front window of Barbaro’s Mercedes, before backseat passenger Joshua Donald Baines fatally fired at his target.
While the first shots would have been fatal, Barbaro ran and was shot again, falling face-first into the street.
“The level of culpability is so extreme that the community interest … can only be met with life imprisonment,” the crown said of Munshizada’s crime.
Sultani and Munshizada were arrested about a fortnight after Barbaro’s murder.
Sultani pleaded guilty to three counts of murder in 2019 while Munshizada was found guilty of the three murders after jury trials in 2020 and 2021.
Baines, 29, and Mirwais Danishyar, 28, were acquitted of Yilmaz’s murder this year but found guilty of Barbaro’s murder.
The four men, who are all in custody, are due to be sentenced on Friday by Justice Desmond Fagan.
Suppressions on the cases, which had been in place to protect the integrity of each trial, were lifted on Thursday despite opposition from the killers’ lawyers.