Identity of Sydney daycare murder target revealed

The Sydney father at the centre of an alleged murder plot outside his children’s daycare centre had allegedly fallen foul of his employers, a transnational crime syndicate based in Vietnam, in a dispute over hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Herald can reveal that the man who was to be killed by three alleged guns for hire, Huy Tran, was at odds with a group who call themselves The Final Crime Family, who believe he owed them $200,000.

Detectives had previously canvassed whether Tran’s loyalties were in question, or whether his employers believed he had stolen drugs. Organised crime squad commander Detective Superintendent Peter Faux has said he believed it was “highly likely” that a syndicate allegedly run by Sydney-born man Daniel Rodney Badger was linked to the attempt on Tran’s life.

The syndicate had allegedly ordered Tran be killed as he collected his small children and a note left atop his corpse in a calculated, cold-blooded murder that was to be livestreamed for crime bosses to watch.

Investigators had been trailing the three would-be killers for a number of weeks when it became apparent that they were prepared to act, police have said. Police acted swiftly when it became apparent they were going to do “something serious”, Faux told reporters earlier this month.

“The activity and the behaviour of these people, it was clear. They were driving in a car, a stolen car, cloned plates, they had balaclavas on,” Faux said.

In dramatic scenes captured on camera on The River Road, Revesby, specialist police pulled a Mitsubishi Outlander and a Mercedes over in peak-hour traffic and peppered the two vehicles with beanbag rounds.

So advanced was the police operation that the jerry cans seized from the allegedly stolen car had been emptied of petrol and filled with water to prevent cars being torched after the event. Investigators were also surveilling up to 15 stolen vehicles when the trio allegedly began to carry out their plan.

Police arrested Greall Tighe, 18, Kevin Mundine, 19, and Tyrone Tuiluga Rio, 26, at the scene and charged them each with a raft of offences including conspiracy to commit murder.

Investigators say that the three men were guns for hire who allegedly took online underworld contracts to carry out the hit, and had no personal connection to Tran.

These revelations come as police on Friday announced the arrest of three other, unconnected, alleged guns for hire who carried out the execution of Sydney mother Thi Kim Tran.

In a crime that horrified Sydney earlier this year, a group of masked men allegedly broke into the 45-year-old’s Bankstown home, kidnapped her, stripped her naked, and fatally shot her before leaving her body in a burnt-out car.

Police allege the men charged with Tran’s murder were hired to kill her husband but, when he couldn’t be found, targeted his wife instead.

The three men, aged 32, 20 and 21, cannot be named for legal reasons.

Two of the three men were already in custody on an unrelated charge of murder when homicide squad detectives arrested them on Thursday morning.

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