One man died and four others were in hospital after a shooting in Sydney’s south-west that police believe was a targeted attack. The wounded men began arriving at hospitals on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning investigators had set up a crime scene at a home on Arbutus Street in Canley Heights.
Police were called to Liverpool Hospital at about 8.30pm after two men, aged 28 and 32, presented with multiple wounds. The 28-year-old died a short time after arriving, while the 32-year-old remained in a serious but stable condition with a neck injury. About 10 minutes later, two other men, aged 22 and 23, arrived at Fairfield Hospital. The 23-year-old had been shot in the neck and the 22-year-old had a shoulder injury. Both were in a serious condition and were transferred to other hospitals for further treatment.
Then, at about 9.50pm, a 19-year-old presented to Liverpool Hospital in a stable condition with a shoulder injury. By that stage, police had a clear sense that the violence had not been random. NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said officers believed the shooting was targeted. “We don’t know the motive for the attack, but we certainly believe that it was a targeted attack,” he said.
The case now sits within a broader pattern police have been watching for some time: gangland violence linked to organised crime. Lanyon said it was too early to say whether any of the men were linked to particular gangs, but he described the attack as having the characteristics of an underworld assault. “This is what we see when organised crime becomes involved, the indiscriminate use of violence, the complete disregard for human life, is something that we won’t tolerate as an organisation,” he said.
Investigators believe the five men were in the Arbutus Street home together, although the circumstances of what happened there remain unclear. Two cars used to drive the men to hospital were seized, giving detectives another line of inquiry as they try to reconstruct the moments before and after the shooting. The 28-year-old who died in hospital had not yet been formally identified.
That leaves police with a case that already points to a deliberate attack, but not yet to the motive or the group behind it. For now, the facts are limited but stark: five men were injured, one died, and detectives are treating the scene in Canley Heights as part of a broader organised-crime conflict that is still playing out in public and in hospitals across Sydney’s south-west.
