Forensics officers have worked through the night at the scene of a daylight shooting in Sydney’s southwest, where a prominent local lawyer was killed at a table outside a cafe.

Vietnamese criminal lawyer Ho Ledinh was shot three times through the back outside the Happy Cup cafe at Bankstown City Plaza on Tuesday afternoon.

New South Wales police believe the attack was targeted.



His attacker, who was wearing a hi-vis vest and a long green coat, according to video footage, has not yet been found and police have been interviewing witnesses and viewing CCTV to try and track him.

Parts of the busy shopping strip remained cordoned off on Wednesday morning.

Hours before the shooting, Ledinh, 65, who is believed to have several younger as well as adult children, was having coffee with his friend of 20 years, Van Nguyen.

Nguyen said he was shocked to receive a phone call later in the day telling him his friend had been shot dead.

“For me he was perfect, he was a very good man and helped people a lot with their families,” he told News Corp.

Ledinh was one of the solicitors who represented Philip Nguyen, the man jailed over the killing of Sydney police constable Bill Crews in 2010.

He was present when the NSW court of criminal appeal increased Nguyen’s minimum jail sentence by six years in August 2013.

Ledinh, who reportedly once owned the Happy Cup cafe and is the author of the English-Vietnamese Dictionary of Law, studied law and political sciences at the University of New South Wales.

The shooting is the latest of several attacks in the area in recent years.

In June 2017, a man was stabbed in the chest in the same plaza.

In April 2016 Walid “Wally” Ahmad was shot dead outside a cafe on the rooftop of nearby Bankstown Central shopping centre.

