Sydney’s gang war has boiled over with gunmen dispatched to shoot up homes while masked men, armed and driving a “kill car”, led police on a high-speed chase across the city in separate incidents.
The anti-gang NSW Police Raptor Squad spotted a stolen white Audi at about 2.30pm Saturday on the Great Western Highway in Wentworthville.
Locals had called police, concerned after seeing a group of men sitting in the car outside the leagues club wearing balaclavas.
When police tried to stop the car, the driver allegedly accelerated away and the occupants threw fuel jerry cans and containers of bleach from the vehicle.
A Raptor car rammed into the Audi, pinning it in on the M4 motorway near Silverwater and three men ran from the car.
The trio were arrested after a short foot chase.
Inside the car, police allegedly found a loaded semi-automatic rifle, a pistol and cloned number plates.
Police charged Ethan Mclaws and Chayce Jensen, both aged 24, with weapons and criminal groups charges.
The alleged driver, 28-year-old Dean Saunders, was also charged with additional driving and stolen car charges. Saunders was wanted for domestic violence and assault.
The men did not appear in court and made no application for bail on Sunday morning.
The white Audi had been stolen on March 7 from Edmondson Park and allegedly used in shootings and arson attacks around Sydney’s south-west, police said.
That included a shooting at a Panania home on March 14 and a firebombing at another Panania home two nights later, where a gun was flashed but not used.
“We believe the vehicle was also linked to three other shooting offences that occurred on the same night in St Johns Park, Colyton, and again, at the same Panania address,” Detective Inspector Brad Abdy told media on Saturday evening.
The Panania attacks are believed to have been captured on CCTV.
Security footage was published by Seven News earlier this month showing one house on Tyalgum Avenue being attacked four times in four weeks.
A white Audi was recorded rolling up outside the home before a gunman emerged and fired once through the bedroom window.
The gunman returned two days later, but the weapon jammed.
On another occasion, the attacker lit a fire in the neighbouring home’s driveway in what police believed was mistaken identity.
Shootings at homes have become all too familiar in Sydney’s south-west as warring gangs vie for control of the drug trade, or exact revenge in tit-for-tat attacks.
Hours after the Audi car chase, in the early morning of Sunday, shots rang out at a home on Columbine Avenue in Punchbowl in another suspected gang attack.
Police raced to the scene and found several shots had been fired into the front of the home from an unknown vehicle.
A few minutes later, at 3am, more calls of gunfire came from Noble Avenue in Greenacre.
Several more shots had been fired from an unknown vehicle into a second home.
No one was injured in either shooting, but police believe the two shootings are linked and a manhunt is now underway for the gunmen.
Police have not said whether the “kill car” was linked to the shootings, or whether any of the weekend’s incidents were linked to a particular underworld group or gang.
In February, a wave of arson and shooting flashed across the city’s south-west as former allies, the Coconut Cartel and Alameddine crime families, fell out with dramatic consequences.
It began with the shooting of former NRL star Matt Utai outside his Greenacre home in the early hours of 17 February. He narrowly survived.
Homes and cars were torched and shot across St Clair, Colyton, Chester Hill and Guildford West in the days that followed.
Police ultimately sheeted the violence home to retaliation against Iziah Utai, a former Alameddine gangster who had patched over to the Coconut Cartel.
Iziah, also known as Ziggy, is believed to be offshore and wanted over the shooting murder of an Alameddine bodyguard.
Police have not suggested the latest wave of violence is linked to that conflict.
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