Men hired to kill stranger in Vancouver sentenced to 10 years in prison

Two would-be contract killers have been sentenced to 10 years in prison in connection with a botched murder attempt outside a Vancouver restaurant in 2020.

With credit for time served, Liban Hassan and Ahmed Ismail will each serve five years and six month.

Court documents show Hassan and Ismail were contracted to travel to Vancouver to try and kill or kidnap Mir Aali Hussain for the price of $150,000.

The pair decided to target Hussain as he left a busy restaurant in the Dunbar neighbourhood on Oct. 6, 2020, just before 6 p.m.

According to the court documents, video shows Hussain was carrying a baby in a car seat and was accompanied by his wife and their three-year-old child when two people opened fire.

“The video does not depict the shooting, but shortly after the victim and his family leave the frame of the video, shots ring out, nine in all, in rapid succession,” the document explains.

“Mr. Ismail and Mr. Hassan had apparently alighted from their vehicle dressed in black and masked. It appears, from the submissions, the victim began to flee. He was hit twice: once in the hip, once in the leg. Mr. Ismail fired eight shots. Mr. Hassan managed to get off one shot before his gun jammed.”

While the pair tried to escape, they were quickly arrested by nearby police officers, “leaving a trail of incriminating evidence in their wake.”

The judge in this case notes the plans and deliberations around killing Hussain were “conveniently memorialized in exquisite detail, by all participants in the scheme, in hundreds of text messages retrieved from phones during the investigation.”

“Paid executioners being hired to kill a perfect stranger, who go about their business without regard to the prospect of collateral damage to blameless bystanders, is deserving of the highest rebuke. But for the fact Mr. Ismail could not shoot straight, I have no doubt both offenders would now be serving life sentences, and considering what to do with their lives in prison for the next, at least, 25 years,” the judge wrote in their decision.

While Hussain survived the 2020 attempt on his life, the 42-year-old died the next year after he was shot in Coquitlam.