The brother of slain standover figure Wally Ahmad has been arrested as he stepped off a flight from the Middle East in relation to one of Sydney's unsolved gangland killings.
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Almost a year after he travelled to Lebanon following a fatal shooting in the south-western suburb of Condell Park, Mahmoud "Brownie" Ahmad touched down at 7.40pm at Sydney Airport on Monday night.
Brownie was swiftly taken into custody by police when he stepped off the Qatar Airways flight from Doha and was taken to Mascot Police Station.
The 34-year-old has been charged with murder.
Police have been keen to talk to the well-known underworld figure ever since he was allegedly linked to the shooting death of Safwan Charbaji in April last year.
He returned home from Lebanon, via Doha, where he has been since the fatal shooting.
An hour after he landed, Brownie covered his face with his hands and had a black hoodie pulled down over his head as two homicide detectives escorted him out of the airport.
He didn't answer any questions as he was led in handcuffs out of the airport and put into the back of a police van.
Speaking to Fairfax Media while in Lebanon, Brownie denied he was on the run and said he had "nothing to clear" up with police.
"Tell the cops to get their facts right first," he told Fairfax Media. "I'm not running or hiding so f--- off. They can talk shit as much as they want."
A status on one of his online profiles reads: "I'm coming back don't worry".
Mr Charbaji was shot dead in a gunfight outside A Team Smash Repairs on Ilma Street in Condell Park.
The violence broke out after the well-known Elmir family turned up at the smash repairs business, run by Brownie's brother Wally, to settle a dispute with the Ahmad family.
Detectives allege Brownie was one of the men who fired a gun during the heated confrontation that spilled out onto the street on a Saturday afternoon.
However he slipped out of the country a few days after the shooting, with some of his family following days after.
Three weeks after the Condell Park shooting, Wally, a widely feared standover man in the south-west, was shot dead at Bankstown Central.
Tit-for-tat reprisal attacks have ensued since.
Earlier this month Kemel "Blackie" Barakat, a close friend of the Ahmad family, was shot dead in his Mortlake unit.
He was a suspect in the shooting of crime figure Hamad Assaad, who was killed in October.
In similar circumstances, Assaad was a suspect in Wally's shooting death months earlier.
