A man linked to the United Nations gang has been convicted in B.C. Supreme Court for his part in a dramatic gunpoint home invasion

A man linked to the United Nations gang has been convicted in B.C. Supreme Court for his part in a dramatic gunpoint home invasion in Vancouver three years ago.

Justice William Ehrcke found Ibrahim Ali guilty of robbery, unlawful confinement, assault with a weapon and several firearms counts in connection with the break-in at Quebec and East 21st Avenue on Dec. 5, 2008.

At the time of the incident, Vancouver police called in the Emergency Response Team to search for the suspects. And police chased a getaway van that smashed into several cars along East 18th.

Area residents reported seeing an armed gunman running down Quebec Street to escape police. Four males were later taken into custody.

Ehrcke heard during Ali’s trial that police were intercepting calls and conversations between him and purported UN gang members Barzan Tilli-Choli and Karwan Ahmet Saed before the home invasion.

And Vancouver police had been alerted and were following the suspects as they made their way from Burnaby to Vancouver just after 6 a.m. to launch the attack.

The Crown argued that the wiretaps clearly showed the accused were prepared to use firearms and violence in the break-in targeting a man named Dashty Babo, who wasn’t home when Ali and his crew arrived. Babo’s roommate, Serajoutdin Mourtazaliev, was in the residence and was assaulted during the home invasion.

“I am satisfied that Mr. Mourtazaliev was unlawfully confined by the men in his bedroom,” Ehrcke said. “He was pushed down in his bed and covered with the blanket by men who threatened him with guns. Later, he was pushed off the bed onto the floor, into the small space between the bed and the wall. These were acts of coercive restraint which intentionally deprived Mr. Mourtazaliev of his freedom of movement.”

Just before the invasion, Ali spoke to Tilli-Choli on the phone: “Now we are driving to the guy’s house.”

And the day before, there were several recorded conversations laying out the plan. Ali spoke to Saed inside a bugged BMW and said he would take cash and a safe box from the house and “if police show up, I’ll leave the pistol inside the car, okay?”

Ali asked how much his associates would be paid for the job, to which Saed replied: “We’ll give each one two, three thousand.”

Ali and Saed scouted out the house on Dec. 4 and are heard on the intercept pointing out which one it was.

“It’s better if they are at home. We’ll beat him at the door,” Ali said.

In a call to Tilli-Choli the day before the home invasion, Ali asked “Yo, man. Are we still going into that guy’s house?” Tilli-Choli said he would discuss it later.

After Ali was arrested, he called Tilli-Choli from jail and said: “We went inside. We broke the door, but there was one Russian guy there. There was a Russian person around. We looked all over there. There were some gold there, ah, no money, no nothing and no safe box were there. We took the gold and then the police, right after we got in to the car, followed us.”

Some of the recorded conversations were in Kurdish and translated for the trial. Neither Tilli-Choli nor Saed were charged, but both are in jail awaiting trial for allegedly conspiring to kill the Bacon brothers and their Red Scorpion associates.

Ali’s co-accused in this case, Malcolm Jamel Drydgen, was earlier convicted and sentenced to more than five years in jail. Two young offenders were also charged. Ali will next appear at the Vancouver Law Courts on Jan. 26, 2012, for a sentencing hearing.

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