Revesby Panania shooting: Amy Hazouri supported sick mother in Lebanon and was a ‘good girl’

An innocent hairdresser who was brazenly shot dead in a gangland assassination had just done a gangster mum’s hair and was preparing for a night out when both were shot dead. 

Amy Hazouri, 39, had just finished a shift at her hair salon in Bankstown, in Sydney’s south west, and was sitting in the back of a Toyota 4WD with friend and client Lametta Fadlallah, 48, when both were gunned down about 6pm on Saturday night.  

Fadlallah is believed to have been the target of the hit – as an active player in the underworld who was once married to Shadi Derbas of the city’s Telopea Street Gang and later a lover of Helal Safi, who was once stabbed 42 times in prison. 

Meanwhile, Ms Hazouri’s family said she was a ‘good girl’ who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Loved ones told Daily Mail Australia that Ms Hazouri worked six days a week to provide for her sick mother in Lebanon and had been planning a trip home to visit her.

But now she is set to make a very different homecoming – with family raising money for her to be transported back to Lebanon in a casket for her funeral. 

Ms Hazouri’s sister Manal revealed on Monday that Ms Hazouri had stepped up to support the family amid an ongoing economic crisis in Lebanon by sending a portion of her weekly pay to cover their bills. 

Friend of eight years Sureyya Gunacti, who works in a neighbouring shop to Ms Hazouri’s salon, Jocelyne Chidiac Hair, said she had been excited to return to Lebanon.

She was planning a trip with her sister to first visit her mother and then travel through the Middle East with her sister, including a visit to Turkey. 

With her poor health, Ms Hazouri’s mother will not be able to make the trip out to Australia and is relying on donations to help cover the cost of returning the 39-year-old’s body to Lebanon.

The family want to stress that she was an ‘innocent party’ in the shooting, confirming an earlier assessment from police that she was likely collateral damage in the targeted attack on Ms Fadlallah. 

‘She was the most beautiful girl,’ Ms Gunacti told Daily Mail Australia. ‘She used come here and sit and talk.

‘Or she would ring me and say ‘let me do your hair, I’ll make you feel nice’.

Ms Gunacti said Ms Hazouri had been working at the salon for up to eight years and was beloved among staff and customers.  

‘She loved her work and everybody loved her. She was a good girl, not married, no kids.

‘She would normally be here at this time, it’s so sad and I feel sad for her parents.’

Ms Gunacti said the salon owner Jocelyne Chidiac was ‘very sad’ about Ms Hazouri’s death as the pair had been ‘very close’.

Colleagues at the salon shared a tribute on Sunday saying they were ‘shattered’ to learn of the untimely death.

‘We are shattered, our heart is broken, you left us too soon,’ the tribute read. ‘May your memory be eternal… until we meet again.’

It’s understood Ms Hazouri visited Ms Fadlallah on Saturday afternoon to do her hair.

They were later getting ready to ‘head on a night out’ moments before the fatal shooting.

How shooting unfolded 

The women were  sitting in the backseat of a silver Toyota 4WD outside her house on Hendy St, Panania in Sydney’s west on Saturday night when up to a dozen bullets were fired through the window. 

The 20-year-old male driver attempted to escape the attack and pulled over around the corner, where he called for help. A 16-year-old female was also in the car.

Police said the pair are both traumatised by what they saw, but assisting police as best they can. 

Over the last 30 years Ms Fadlallah was married to two of the Harbour City’s major crime bosses and was an ‘active’ player in their dark underworld.

There are fears underworld bosses have ‘torn up the rule book’ which once promised women and children would always be off limits. 

Ms Fadlallah was first married to Shadi Derbas in the 1990s, a key member of the Telopea St Gang – coined after the Punchbowl, Western Sydney street – which rose to infamy between 1998 and 2000 as a hornets’ nest of Middle Eastern gang activity.

More recently, she was the long term girlfriend of underworld figure Helal Safi – who was found dead in a Sydney apartment in January 2021 after suffering a heart attack. 

The Daily Telegraph’s crime editor Mark Morri said Ms Fadlallah was ‘gunned down like a crime figure’ and was actively involved in crime herself. 

‘You wouldn’t just say that she was on the peripheral,’ he told Sunrise host David Koch on Monday morning.

‘She knew some very, very senior people in Sydney’s underworld and maybe she knew too much, maybe she was involved in some transaction where somebody felt slighted and that’s the price you pay in that world at the moment’. 

Mr Morri said there were at least two to three active contracts to kill ‘floating around the city’ at any given time and said killing someone, which used to be a last resort, had become the ‘quick option’ for settling a dispute. 

‘There are a few that are professional but the old adage of a well-known hitman, that is gone. These are just little young kids,’ he said. 

It comes after an underworld source who knew Ms Fadlallah told the Daily Telegraph she had been ‘playing with the big boys’ and perhaps knew too much.  

‘She was right into the life. She would carry the guns for the boys, give alibis when needed and right up till she was killed mixing with gangsters,’ they said. 

‘She always thought she was smart but this is the most dangerous Sydney has ever been. Killing women so openly is next level.’

Ms Fadlallah’s long-time boyfriend Helal Safi survived a jailhouse assassination plot in 2010 after he was stabbed 42 times by rival gangsters.

His injuries were so severe that he fell into a coma for five months with police crediting his size for keeping him alive.

He was known as a ‘major player’ who associated with bikies and criminals and was feared across Sydney’s underworld.

It was already feared that Sydney’s ongoing gang war was out of control with 14 execution-style killings playing out across the city in the past two years – as various Middle Eastern crime gangs and their bikie muscle fight for control of the lucrative drug trade on the heels of the pandemic.

But with victim 15 and 16 now added onto the list of over-worked detectives, police say it’s clear underworld bosses have ‘torn up the rules’ and that the streets have never been so bloody.

Detectives are investigating the links between the pair and other criminals Ms Fadlallah could have associated with – and whether she had information that others wanted to keep silent. 

Several crime scenes have been established with police working to trace four burnt-out cars scattered across three suburbs in Sydney’s west. 

The killers are believed to have burnt stolen cars, some which may have been planted as decoys, to confuse police and make it difficult to trace DNA. 

NSW Police Detective Inspector Danny Doherty fronted camera’s on Sunday acknowledging the shooting was ‘unprecedented’ in that an ‘unwritten law’ among Sydney’s underworld that women and families were off-limits had been broken.

He said police would stop at nothing to catch the perpetrators.

‘This is an appalling attack on two women. They have lost their lives. It was a planned murder, an assassination really, and it’s happened in a public street in Sydney,’ he said.

‘It’s unacceptable by any standards. It’s unprecedented really. And we are determined to get the answers for the family.’

‘They don’t discriminate if you’re male or female. Every rule book has been thrown out, and that is concerning.’