A man has thanked God multiple times as a jury acquitted him of helping murder a man in a spray of bullets, days after his alleged co-conspirator was found guilty.
Yusuf Nazlioglu, 40, died a day after being shot at least eight times by a man with a pistol in the underground car park of his apartment at Rhodes, in Sydney‘s inner west, on June 27, 2022.
Mohammed Baltagi, 26, Mohammed Hosni Khaled, 27, and Abdulrahman Atteya, 31, were charged with forming a joint criminal agreement to kill Nazlioglu.
Prosecutors alleged Baltagi and Khaled helped plan Nazlioglu’s murder.
The trio faced a combined weeks-long trial in the NSW Supreme Court after pleading not guilty to the charges.
While Khaled was found guilty on Monday after a week of deliberations, jurors on Thursday found Baltagi not guilty of murder.
The acquitted man was heard repeatedly saying “thank God” in Arabic as the jury departed the courtroom to continue deliberating on the final verdict of Atteya.
Prosecutors alleged the shooting was carried out either by Atteya or another man – Rabieh Baltagi, who fled Australia in July 2022.
During the trial, Nazlioglu’s widow Jade Jeske, formerly Jade Heffer, described seeing her husband shot in the car park.
She said she saw someone covering his head running with a pistol towards her husband as he stood next to their car.
Jeske ducked under the dash to hide as she heard eight successive gunshots and then a further two, the jury heard.
As the shooter fled to a waiting VW Golf, she filmed what was happening on her phone before turning to her husband.
The jury heard her husband’s killing may have been motivated by the theft of two rented luxury vehicles from a business in Lansdale, in western Sydney.
The court was told the three accused murderers had connections at the rental business.
