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September 2, 2026 — 5:58pm
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The killing of an apparently innocent bystander in an early-morning sneak attack on a home in south-west Sydney has made a nonsense of claims by authorities to be cracking down on gangland violence.
A 23-year-old university student, Marco Tapia, was shot dead in bed inside his family’s Glen Alpine home early on Tuesday.
Multiple offenders fled the property before police arrived. Authorities are still in the dark as to their identities.
The NSW Police Commissioner said more than 700 people connected with organised crime had been arrested for committing offences “exactly like” the Glen Alpine execution.
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But Marco Tapia’s death is emblematic of the failure to stop these men and teenagers and their remorseless tit-for-tat culture that is a law unto itself and feeds on violence.
Gangland wars have long been part of Sydney’s criminal underbelly and NSW Police have sometimes been accused of allowing villains to “sort themselves out” as long as they didn’t frighten the horses.
But those days are over. Criminals now recruit teenagers to do their dirty work at arm’s length and cut-price rates. Gang violence has claimed at least 20 lives in two years and left many wounded in drive-by shootings, home invasions and brazen daytime attacks, often in south-west Sydney.
The Glen Alpine murder followed an attack on a relative of alleged crime figure Bilal Alameddine at South Granville on Saturday evening. A rival gang leader with the self-proclaimed Coconut Cartel took to social media to sneer at Marco Tania’s killers: “Popped the wrong person. Didn’t even get the right house.”
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This new era of gang violence came to public attention after a spate of shootings and deaths in the winter of 2023. Then Police Commissioner Karen Webb established Taskforce Magnus to investigate, but following a series of mishaps she announced her resignation in May 2025 and Mal Lanyon stepped into the job, promising to stamp out gangland violence.
But even before Lanyon took over, shootings began to climb as the Alameddine crime network fell out with former allies.
A waitress was left fighting for her life after being caught in the crossfire when rival gangs exchanged shots at Auburn’s M Brothers Turkish restaurant. Then last February, the body of Chris Baghsarian, an elderly widower mistakenly snatched from his North Ryde home, was discovered.
Today’s gang members and their boy soldiers are reckless brutes with no respect for the lives of others. Regrettably, their reign of terror has now evolved into an everyday fear for many Sydneysiders.
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