A Vietnamese mother may have been burned alive after being kidnapped from her Sydney home by five hooded thugs who also bashed her eight-year-old son with a baseball bat, leaving him lying in a pool of blood.
Thi Kim Tran, 45, was in her living room in Bankstown, an immigrant-dominated suburb in the city’s southwest, with her sons aged eight and 15 when a group of masked men armed with bats and guns burst in at about 10.30pm on Thursday, The Daily Telegraph reported.
NSW Police said the younger boy was struck in the head with a bat before Ms Tran was stripped of her clothes and dragged into a black SUV. An hour later the car was found ablaze in the suburb of Beverly Hills, 6km away, with a body believed to be hers in the backseat.
One of Ms Tran’s neighbours told 7NEWS.com.au he saw men in hoodies speaking Arabic walking in and out of the street earlier that evening, and said the same group returned shortly before Ms Tran’s screams were heard.
Police are now looking into whether Ms Tran, who did not have a criminal record, was the victim of a contract killing ordered by Asian drug lords.
Superintendent Rodney Hart said visual identification of the body was impossible, but said police are confident it was Ms Tran, and cannot rule out that she was burned alive.
“This crime is horrendous, the level of violence is unheard of,” he said.
“I can only imagine what those children went through seeing the woman dragged out of the home and forced into the back of the car.
“But I want to reassure the community we strongly believe this is a targeted incident and this has not been a random kidnapping.”
The eight-year-old boy is in an induced coma after undergoing surgery for his head wounds, while his 15-year-old brother is also in hospital being treated for shock.
Police sources told The Daily Telegraph detectives were looking into whether the family was linked to the drug trade, and Mr Hart said the family was not known to police to the point they would be considered “a high target in the organised crime network or world”.
Ms Tran’s husband was interstate at the time of the attack and has since returned to Sydney.
Bankstown, where 20.3% of the population speak Vietnamese at home, 19.3% speak Arabic and only 5.7% have both parents born in Australia, is notorious for Middle Eastern and Asian crime and has been one of the epicentres of Sydney’s gang wars since the 1990s.
Header image: Left, right, the torched car where the body was found (7 News).
