A jury has found a bikie guilty of the freeway execution of Melbourne grocer Paul Virgona, weeks after an associate pleaded guilty to his role in the crime.

Aaron Ong was convicted by a jury on Monday after a three-week trial in Victoria’s Supreme Court.

His co-accused Josh Rider had been due to stand trial alongside him, but after seeking a sentence indication he pleaded guilty just beforehand.

His plea was kept from jurors and suppressed until Monday’s verdict.

Mr Virgona was on his way to an Epping market in Melbourne’s north to sort his daily order of fruit and veg when he was shot dead on the Eastlink freeway just after 2am on November 9, 2019.

Victim died from blood loss

Eleven rounds from a semi-automatic handgun were fired into the driver’s side of his van. Seven bullets struck the 46-year-old, who died from blood loss at the scene.

After leaving the Mongols outlaw motorcycle clubhouse in Port Melbourne, Ong and Rider had watched Mr Virgona’s Croyden home for two hours before following him to the freeway.

It’s not known why Mr Virgona was killed. He didn’t know Ong or Rider, had no criminal associations and was not linked to the Mongols.

“There was nothing in Mr Virgona’s background that explained why he was targeted and killed,” prosecutor Mark Gibson KC said during Ong’s trial.

Unclear who fired the fatal shots

It’s also unclear which of the men fired the fatal shots, or which had been behind the wheel of the stolen vehicle used in the killing.

Ong was convicted on the basis he and Rider were each complicit in Mr Virgona’s murder, having a joint intention to kill or really seriously injure him.

The men had stored a getaway car at a semi-rural property in Mooroolbark but their plan to go unnoticed came unstuck when a motion-activated security camera alerted a builder to a suspicious car parked in the driveway of a home under construction.

Police were notified, and about an hour after the shooting officers tried to intercept the second stolen vehicle.

They were led on a high-speed chase which ended when the stolen car collided with a sign.

Two offenders fled on foot into Bayswater Park. The gun used to kill Mr Virgona has never been found.

Ong and Rider were arrested and charged with murder in January 2020 after dawn raids on a dozen properties linked to the Mongols bikie gang, including their Port Melbourne and Ferntree Gully clubhouses.

The men will not be sentenced until next year. A pre-sentence hearing for Ong has been scheduled for March 1.

-AAP