‘It’s the Wild West’: How a shaken Sydney is grappling with the gang war

Ahmad Hraichie has buried many gangsters in his time as a Muslim undertaker. He’s buried small time runners, heads of crime families and everyone in between.

He knows death and its sudden movements well. But even he is shaken by the escalating gangland violence in western Sydney.

“There were rules before: you don’t shoot innocent people, you don’t shoot kids or women, you don’t shoot at funerals,” he says. “It’s wild now, there are no rules.”

“Yeah, it’s gangsters, but gangsters once had ethics and morals and integrity. They’d help an old lady on the street.

Hraichie is speaking at the Muslim morgue under Lakemba Mosque where Louis Meehan was washed and prepared for burial on Saturday, as per the strict Islamic protocols on death.

A body must be washed, wrapped in a white shroud, prayed over and buried as soon as possible, part of a broader Islamic belief in death being a transition from life to the afterlife. Delays are seen as holding the soul back from moving to the next phase of existence.

Meehan was shot dead behind his boxing gym in the Punchbowl Community Centre car park on Wednesday night, as community members and school students watched on.

He died under a hail of gunfire from an assailant who fled in a silver Lexus. Police believe the attack is linked to organised crime in western Sydney. Meehan had posted photos online wearing merchandise linked to the Alameddine crime gang, which is locked in a murderous war with rival gang the Coconut Cartel.

Meehan’s killing was the third in a little over a week. University student Marco Tapia, 23, was shot dead in his bed in Glen Alpine on Tuesday last week. The next day, Joshua Macdonald, 40, was shot in the doorway of a Merrylands West home. Two men were arrested on Friday in connection with that shooting, including an alleged drone operator.

In the two years to June, 19 people died amid escalating violence, a Herald analysis found, including 100 shootings and 52 firebombings.

The violence has coalesced into a haze that hangs over western Sydney, a dread looming over a region that has known violence before but not like this.

“It’s getting worse, and it is driven by many factors, including the intoxicating draw of social media and the internet,” Hraichie says. “It’s brazen now. People are doing it in the middle of the day, and part of that is the internet.

“The world has become so fast and people are struggling. And to these kids, it’s all about the lifestyle, the haircuts, the cars, the money. It’s all about living in this moment, right now, no future.

Like many in western Sydney, Hraichie has seen different eras of gang violence break out. There were the gangland wars of the 1980s, the postcode wars of the late 2010s, the feud between the Hamzy and Alameddine families.