Shooter Kills Two Sydney Women in ‘Organised, Methodical Murder’

At about 9 p.m. Saturday night in the Sydney suburb of Panania, as 48-year-old Lametta Fadlallah and 39-year-old Amy Al-Hazzouri sat in the backseat of a stationary car, a figure approached, using the barrel of their gun to tap on the closed window.

Opening fire on a public street, the shooter allegedly splayed the car with a number of bullets, which killed the two victims, leaving only a 16-year-old girl and 20-year-old man alive in the front seats. 

Home security footage, published by The Australian this morning, caught the incident on camera before the 20-year-old driver fled the scene to then call emergency services. Both women were rushed to nearby hospitals but couldn’t be saved. 

“There used to be an unwritten law with the criminal element, especially in organised crime,” NSW Police detective superintendent Danny Doherty said at a press conference on Sunday. “You don’t touch family, you don’t touch women.”

Journalists at the press conference queried whether the shooting was connected to the spate of deaths connected to the continued tensions between the Hamzy and Alameddine families, but Doherty was quick to defer the possibility, saying that the motives behind the shooting were still unclear. 

​​“There is no evidence at all that it’s linked to the current conflict or any other conflict. We have to look at this matter on its own,” Doherty said.

According to Doherty, the shooting was an “organised, methodical murder” aimed at killing Fadlallah, who NSW police are investigating for prior associations and relationships with other crime-connected identities in the past. These include an alleged previous relationship with a founding member of a street gang and also a notorious Kings Cross drug dealer, Halal Safi, who was found dead earlier this year.

NSW police are also enquiring into whether the killing of Fadlallah was an attempt at silencing information she may have had on Sydney’s criminal underworld.

Over the last year, the rivalry between two crime families in Sydney – the Hamzys and the Alemaddines – is alleged to have resulted in 13 contract deaths, bubbling over into a conflict that the state’s police have had difficulty controlling. 

NSW police say it started in October of 2020, over a dispute of stolen drugs involving more than 300 people. It’s an ongoing event that has so far led to the deaths of senior Hamzy members including Mejid Hamzy, Bilal Hamze and Ghassan Amoun.  

In a clash that has until now only involved men, Doherty said that the rules of engagement have been disregarded in relation to the involvement of women.

“I think they just don’t care any more. I think this demonstrates how low they’ve got at this point,” he said.

“They don’t care. They don’t discriminate if you’re male or female.”

Doherty added: “It appears that the 39-year-old woman [Amy Al-Hazzouri] sitting next to her is completely an innocent party to all this and she’s lost her life as a result of this.”

Close to the scene, police also found four cars – two of them Mercedes Benz’s – doused in petrol, which were set alight and burnt in nearby streets. They’re clues that police are investigating as they could hold evidence for the circumstances of the shooting.

For now, in an interview to 2GB radio, Doherty said that South West Sydney’s Operation Hawk – a task force created this year to crackdown on organised crime – is working closely with the community to target networks and families to make sure there’s “no repercussions” as “there’s always a fear that some type of retribution could happen.”

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