The young man accused of fatally shooting a Melbourne rapper has pleaded guilty three years after the crime. The shooter entered the musician's Sunshine home armed with a machete and a gun because he thought a million dollars was stashed inside.
After eleven hundred and six days in custody, twenty one year old Mustafa al Hassn today pleaded guilty not to the murder of Chris Habyakari, but to homicide by firearm, an unusual charge that lessens his responsibility. That technicality sparking an hour's long debate at the Supreme Court this morning. All parties agreed that mister al Hassan, then eighteen years old, had planned to rob the rapper's home in Sunshine with two friends with a gun, a machete, and a taser after learning he had a million dollars stashed inside. He fired a single shot that killed the twenty four year old. But just as Christopher Biel found numerous inconsistencies in the rest of the story, if you were expecting the house to be unoccupied, why would you go in armed to the teeth? The defense standing by the lesser charge he was not in ten to land a bullet in mister Haabiyakari. The impact on the victim's father, read out in court. I feel incomplete, weak and incompetent, the judge said. While this was a rather later guilty plea, more than three years after the offense, mister al Hassan would still receive a significant reduction on his sentence, the defense hoping his age and lack of prior offenses will also be taken into account. The rapper safe was later found to contain forty seven thousand dollars Beth and Yeomen seven News