The mother faces 39 charges including directing the activities of a criminal group and dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.

Her daughter was charged with seven offences including recklessly dealing with proceeds of crime and being part of a criminal group.

During the early-morning arrest at the pair’s multi-million-dollar mansion, police seized financial documents, mobile phones, luxury handbags, a 40 gram gold bar worth A$10,000 ($6,500; £5,000) and $6,600 in casino chips.

Investigators also froze about A$15m in assets, adding to A$60m in assets already seized from a wider probe into the syndicate that started last year.

Police launched Strike Force Myddleton to investigate a criminal group allegedly using stolen identities to get loans for “ghost cars” – luxury cars that did not exist.

“What began as an investigation into fraudulent car financing has expanded into uncovering one of the most sophisticated financial crime syndicates I have seen in my career at the helm of the Financial Crimes Squad,” said Det Supt Gordon Arbinja, commander of the financial crimes squad.

Police claim the criminal group’s activities include “large-scale personal, business and home loan fraud against multiple financial institutions”.

According to an investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald, the mother-and-daughter duo are linked to what’s been dubbed the Penthouse Syndicate, as the alleged ringleader lived in an A$18m penthouse in Sydney.

Police claim the group defrauded major Australian banks of up to A$250m with allegedly corrupt bank staff approving loans to help the syndicate buy multiple properties in Sydney, according to the SMH.

More than a dozen people have already been arrested, charged with a range of offences including fraud and money laundering, in what is believed to be one of the largest such cases in Australia.

“We’ve put a stop to it and there won’t be any more safaris,” the officer was told, according to Ansa news agency. Within two to three months the trips had stopped.

Ezio Gavazzeni, who usually writes about terrorism and the mafia, first read about the sniper tours to Sarajevo three decades ago when Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported the story, but without firm evidence.

He returned to the topic after seeing “Sarajevo Safari”, a documentary film from 2022 by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic which alleges that those involved in the killings came from several countries, including the US and Russia as well as Italy.

Gavazzeni began to dig further and in February handed prosecutors his findings, said to amount to a 17-page file including a report by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic.

An investigation in Bosnia itself appears to have stalled.

Speaking to Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper, Gavazzeni alleges that “many” took part in the practice, “at least a hundred” in all, with Italians paying “a lot of money” to do so, up to €100,000 (£88,000) in today’s terms.

In 1992, late Russian nationalist writer and politician Eduard Limonov was filmed firing multiple rounds into Sarajevo from a heavy machine gun.

He was being given a tour of hillside positions by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was later convicted of genocide by an international tribunal in the Hague.

Limonov didn’t pay for his war tourism, though. He was there as an admirer of Karadzic, telling him: “We Russians should take example from you.”

Italian prosecutors and police are said to have identified a list of witnesses as they try to establish who might have been involved.

However, members of the British forces who served in Sarajevo in the 1990s have told the BBC that they never heard of any so-called “sniper tourism” during the Bosnian conflict.

They indicated that any attempts to bring in people from third countries who had paid to shoot at civilians in Sarajevo would have been “logistically difficult to accomplish”, due to the proliferation of checkpoints.

British forces served both inside Sarajevo and in the areas surrounding the city, where Serb forces were stationed and they saw nothing at the time to suggest that “sniper tourism” was taking place.

One soldier described the allegations that foreigners had paid to shoot at civilians as an “urban myth”.

The head of internal security in Damascus province, Brig-Gen Osama Atkeh, was cited by the state-run Sana news agency as saying that security forces were investigating the theft, which he said had targeted several “archaeological statues and rare collectibles”.

He added that guards at the museum and other individuals were being questioned.

The National Museum, which was established in 1919, houses the most important archaeological collection in Syria.

It includes clay cuneiform tablets dating back to the 14th Century BC from Ugarit, where evidence of the oldest known complete alphabet was discovered; 1st and 2nd Century AD Greco-Roman sculptures from Palmyra, one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world; and a 3rd Century AD synagogue that was built at Dura Europos.

The museum was forced to close in 2012, one year after the start of the devastating civil war. Most of the collection was evacuated and kept at secret locations to protect them.

It opened partially in 2018 and resumed full operations in January 2025, a month after rebel forces overthrew President Bashar al-Assad.

All six of Syria’s Unesco World Heritages sites were damaged or partially destroyed during the civil war.

The Islamic State group blew up several temples and other structures at Palmyra, claiming that they were idolatrous. Unesco condemned the destruction as a war crime.

Many artefacts were also destroyed or looted from archaeological sites and museums.

[BBC]