EXCLUSIVE | The Herald Sun Pinned The Drones on Kaz Hamad, They Didn’t Give You the Truth

The network he left behind didn’t die at the cell door. Lieutenants, tax and fires. Majid Alibadi just copped years this week for the old Karizma jobs against Haddara interests. All of that is on the record and none of it needs a fairy tale.

The fairy tale is everything to Jon Kaila. He has form for spreading very dangerous misinformation.

Hamad’s life term came out of Karkh, that’s the court that sat. Dr Faiq Zaidan is president of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council and head of the whole show. Not the bloke in the judges box handing down the sentence. The paper still calls him the judge who jailed him, I guess they needed a face so they took the biggest one on the letterhead. That’s not a typo, that’s the foundation; get the job wrong and you can get the motive wrong too.

Then the drones in mid-August, Iraqi security and the Arab press reported a foiled hit on Zaidan. Weaponised drones were at a house or a motorcade, fifteen people got locked up. Gear was seized. Over there they framed it as armed factions, monopoly on weapons, anti-corruption, Iran-aligned militias in the PMF orbit. Al Arabiya and Al Hadath reported the facts. Not one of those reports puts a deported Melbourne importer on the phone from a cell. Kaila even writes the escape hatch. "It is not known if Hamad was behind that specific threat." Then he gives him the drones in the headline anyway. Why?

The visa pitch sits on one unnamed brother-in-law in Sydney, he says they wrote to Albanese, Wong, Burke, a local MP, Krissy Barrett and didn't get a reply. He claims that Aussie information is why Hamad got life. He's whinged about the family having to move houses, rides in a bulletproof car, and is upset kids can’t play in the street. Some of that last part may be true. Baghdad isn’t Altona and Zaidan had enemies long before Hamad ever saw a an Iraqi Court dock. The letters aren’t verified outside this yarn, a relative’s fear is not an order to kill.

Then they used Haddara’s driveway for some more colour.

Fadi Haddara got shot on 16 August in Marigold Avenue in Altona North. He was sitting in his BMW when multiple rounds were fired into his face. Kids were inside the house the house at the time and the police have called it targeted. Then they said the part the front page doesn’t want. Nothing had jumped out as a current threat, the motive had not yet been established. They hoped it wasn’t the start of another feud, that’s a copper talking like a man who hasn’t got Kazem Hamad on tape.

The Age lot wrote it straighter, their sources said Haddara wasn’t known to be actively feuding with anyone lately. This is fact. He is semi-retired and runs a paint business and remains in the same pocket of Altona he never left. Living like a man who thought the war was over. The hit still looked professional. White Commodore doing laps in the afternoon. Then the driveway. That’s not random. It’s also not proof The Commission was collecting a smoke tax.

Fadi Afram gets dragged in because he’s old Haddara muscle. 2014 court material had him as sergeant-at-arms for the crime family, guns in the walls, the whole underbelly scene. Then he’s on the list of associates shot in that same stretch. Heidelberg West in broad daylight, and another one in Borrack Square. The papers draw a ruler from Afram back to Hamad because that’s the ruler they’ve used since 2023, banging on about the Tasmanian tobacco job. The Commission. The same crap they've been spewing since the first firebombing.

Katie Tangey gets a paragraph too. The wrong house in Truganina was firebombed in January 2025, she was innocent and now she's dead. Police later said they believed Hamad hired the pair, but no proof exists which ties him to that job. The reward for intel is still out, that’s an allegation they keep repeating because it does the emotional work the drone line can’t.

Here’s the part they won’t print, because they’ve already picked their monster.

Sources closer to the families than the Herald Sun will ever get say the two Fadi shootings are not tobacco, not drugs, not territory. They name Fawzi Haraket and Alz Richa. They say the orders came out of Lebanon. They say it started inside. Both Fadi Haddara and Afram were responsible for terrorising Haraket when he was in prison. He was allegedly stood over and forced into the boneyard (aka protection). He’s never got over it and hold grudges longer than any person I've known. And now, while every editor in this town is starving for another Kaz splash, he’s making his move on the assumption the whole lot lands on the bloke in the Iraqi cell.

Haddara had already been squeezed by Hamad a couple years ago. Trackers were found on the car in 2024, the surrender yarn, the million-dollar buyout talk. Out of the ciggies game, or close enough that police and underworld sources were calling him done. If there’s nothing left to take off him in the market, you need another reason he copped a semi-professional hit in his own driveway with his kids inside. The Herald Sun doesn’t have one. They just say Hamad must be responsible, as it the easier and safer option.

Afram is the same pattern. An associate, not a shopfront. If you’re settling an old jail score you hit the two names that were putting it on you inside, you don’t need a tobacco shop for that.

And the cover is perfect, Hamad is already the automatic author of every bullet in the Melbourne. The Commission, 313 blah blah. Once the tellie locks that in, a man with a grudge and an offshore line can work underneath it.

Lebanon isn’t a fantasy setting either. The Haddaras’ money and supply have run through there for years. That’s been reported to death. Dubai too, multiple offshore nodes. The papers just stop looking once they’ve got Kaz in the frame.

So what’s solid? Hamad’s life sentence in Iraq. Aussie help is on that file, the tax-and-burn model as it’s been described in court. A reported drone plot against Zaidan that Iraqi coverage treats as a militia and state-power fight, not a part of the Melbourne gangland war. Haddara and Afram were targeted, and then shot. No public motive is locked in, there is no public charge tying Hamad to either job.

What’s not solid. Hamad ordered killer drones onto a judge and his kids in the Iraqi Green Zone. Hamad ordered the Altona driveway job or the Heidelberg hit. Haraket and Richa as the men who gave the order, that is first person source material. Who’s actually holding the phone in Lebanon and handing down orders in Australia is proven, my allegations stay as they are. A better explanation than the one on the front page, not a conviction.

The Herald Sun needed Hamad to appear worse today than he was yesterday. A Sydney relative gave them a visa campaign and a sob story, Iraq gave them a drone plot that was already in the Arab press (albeit not linked in anyway to Hamad). Haddara’s driveway gave them colour, then they stitched it, hedged it, and ran it as confirmed news.

Hamad can be a serious player and still not be the author of every ugly thing that happens while his name is hot. Both things can be true. The commercial press can’t sit with that because it doesn’t travel.