Shooting victim warned he was a target before attack outside pub

The intended target of a brazen assassination attempt was warned by police of threats to his life before he and a group of associates were set upon by a gunman outside a busy inner west pub.

Maradona Yalda, 31, was seriously injured when he was shot several times outside the Harold Park Hotel in Forest Lodge on Sunday night. Yalda’s associate, Gilbert Shino, 39, was killed after being peppered with bullets as he tried to flee the shooting.

Yalda was shot in the neck, chest and abdomen. He was taken to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, where he remains in a critical condition.

Police sources told the Herald that Yalda has long been linked to Assyrian organised crime gangs in Sydney’s west, including DLASTHR – or “The Last Hour” – and is known to authorities for a range of alleged offending tied to the groups.

Yalda, Shino and three other associates had been at the hotel since about midday, watching an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. Shino was known to police through his associations with Assyrian organised crime gangs, but not for serious offending linked to the groups.

The group left the venue and was walking towards a car, a grey Ford Ranger Raptor, when they were “ambushed” by at least one gunman firing shots, Detective Superintendent Alfio Sergi said on Monday.

Shino succumbed quickly near the vehicle, while Yalda ran back toward the hotel, being struck by bullets as he went, before he “slumped over a garbage bin on Alfred Street”.

Witnesses reported hearing between six and 12 gunshots before multiple suspects were seen fleeing.

Police believe the attackers fled on foot before escaping in a dark-coloured Ford Mustang. A matching car was found on fire about 9.50pm on Monday on Primrose Avenue in Rydalmere.

Fire and Rescue NSW extinguished the blaze and NSW Police declared the fire suspicious.

Sydney’s Assyrian gangs came to prominence in the 1990s, but were largely dismantled after years of bloody conflicts and turf wars over the control of the drug trade in the city’s west.

DLASTHR members typically inked their backs with a tattoo of a clenched fist and the group’s name, and have been linked to a number of violent crimes, including murder, extortion, armed robberies and several drive-by shootings in and around Fairfield.

The gang was formed as an offshoot of the Assyrian Kings or the Spencer Street Group, which was involved in the stabbing and bashing murder of off-duty police officer David Carty in 1997.

DLASTHR and The True Kings, a rival Assyrian gang, were the focus of NSW Police’s now disbanded Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad during a series of violent incidents believed to have been linked to the group almost a decade ago.

Sergi said possible links to organised crime would be the focus of the investigation. When asked if police had interviewed Yalda, Sergi said he was still undergoing treatment in hospital.

“He’s just gone through his second round of surgery,” he said.

Sergi said it was not clear how many gunmen were involved, but there were “possibly more” than one involved in the “brazen” and “callous” attack.

“I wouldn’t discount there being a second shooting or a second person involved, perhaps in a getaway vehicle.”

Police blocked off Wigram Road and the hotel was evacuated as paramedics and police officers descended on the scene. Locals reported being told to stay indoors.

“There was an employee of the pub. She was outside in a terraced area of the pub, and she was picking up glasses, and as it’s been described to me, ‘a bullet whizzed past her’,” Sergi said.

Passers-by rushed in to help the wounded. Medical students who were inside the pub and a doctor who lived nearby provided the first medical response.

“I want to thank them, commend them for their quick actions and trying to assist,” Sergi said.

The hotel’s manager, who asked not to be named for security reasons, said Yalda’s group had just left the pub when they were shot as they walked up Wigram Road. She said the hotel was fairly crowded at the time, with about 60 patrons watching the UFC.

The crime scene outside the hotel remained in place for much of Monday as homicide squad detectives prepared to take charge of the investigation.

A local, Charlotte, said she ran out to the street and saw one of the men shot “at least six times”, including in the neck, chest, abdomen, arms and legs.

“But he was still conscious, and they put him in the ambulance, so hopefully he makes a full recovery,” she said.

“It just doesn’t feel like something that happens in Sydney very often, but when it does happen, it feels pretty scary.”

Another woman, who asked not to be identified, said she was dropping her sister-in-law off at the hotel when the shots were fired.

“She had one foot out the door, and then we heard the shots, about 12 shots,” the woman said.

She said she initially thought the shots were fireworks. Shortly after, she saw two women crouching for cover behind a bar.

The woman said a man dressed all in black ran from the hotel immediately after the shooting. “He was running very fast,” she said. “He looked like he was scared.”

NSW Premier Chris Minns called the shooting a “horrifying, violent criminal act”.

“It’s deplorable, it’s disgusting. It’s the kind of thing that you don’t expect to see in a reasonably safe city like Sydney,” he said on Monday.

“We can’t promise an end to this despicable and horrific violence. We can promise a comprehensive police response, and NSW Police have locked up and put in jail for decades the people who are responsible for these violent public gangland crimes.”

Sunday’s shooting comes after a period of relative calm following a series of tit-for-tat incidents linked to feuds within Sydney’s underworld.

Several high-profile underworld figures were targeted in shootings over the past six months as the feuds escalated. Sunday’s shooting is not linked to those conflicts.

With Jessica McSweeney

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