Beginning last night U.S. time, and roughly mid-morning local time, there’s been a hostage situation at a cafe in the heart of the business and financial district in Sydney, Australia that appears to have some element of ISIS-related terrorism associated with it:
SYDNEY, Australia — An assailant carrying a black flag with white Arabic script held hostages in one of this sunny city’s favored holiday haunts — a cafe specializing in chocolate drinks and desserts — through the day Monday, throwing Sydney’s center into lockdown and testing Australia’s heavily armed tactical response police, negotiators and the government’s readiness for a terrorist attack.
The assailant walked into the Lindt Chocolate Café, at the top of Sydney’s Martin Place in the city center, at around 9:45 a.m. local time, locking the door and capturing an unknown number of cafe workers and coffee and chocolate drinkers, some picking up a caffeine hit on their way to work, others taking a midmorning break. The cafe is as much a regular coffee stop for local office workers as it is a tourist draw.
Helicopters hovered over the city, the train network was temporarily stopped and strategic buildings — including the nearby Sydney Opera House, the New South Wales Parliament, the state library, law courts and the Reserve Bank were evacuated or shut down. Traffic on part of Sydney’s iconic Harbor Bridge was stopped.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott confirmed he had briefed the National Security Committee of the cabinet twice within six hours, and two ministers were returning from overseas, underscoring the seriousness of the siege.
“This is a very disturbing incident,” Mr. Abbott said in a televised message from Canberra, the nation’s capital. “It is profoundly shocking that innocent people should be held hostage by an armed person claiming political motivation.
“We are a free, open and generous people, and today we have responded to this in character. Yes, it has been a difficult day. Yes, it has been a day which has tested us, but so far, like Australians in all sorts of situations, we have risen to the challenge.”
Five people, including two cafe employees, had fled by 7 p.m. local time, but it was not clear whether the assailant had allowed them to leave or they had escaped.
Stephen Loane, the chief executive of Lindt Australia, said that nine or 10 employees were inside the cafe when the siege started, along with an unknown number of customers. “Originally, we were thinking it was a holdup,” he said, but “by the time I got down there, the streets were blocked off and there was a different situation.”
Soon after the siege began, a commercial television network, Channel Seven, which has a nearby studio, showed footage of people, one wearing the Lindt Café uniform, pressed against the cafe window, holding up the black flag with white script.
The deputy police commissioner, Catherine Burn, said that the police had made contact with the armed person inside the cafe, and that they were working to resolve the standoff “peacefully.”
“Nobody has been harmed or injured at the moment,” she said. “We have been working through our negotiations to try to make sure that people inside” have “what they need so that they don’t become ill or injured.”
Offices near the cafe had been evacuated and a number of streets were closed, the police said. The police also asked that people in offices nearby “remain indoors and away from open windows.”
Live television footage showed shoppers and office workers gathered some distance from the cafe, behind shelters, and television news showed heavily armed police officers in the area.
The police did not say whether a terrorist group or an individual with links to terrorism was behind the siege.
But James Brown, a military analyst at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, said, “Someone in that shop wants us to know they have an Islamic link.”
He added: “They could be doing it for any one of a number of reasons; it could be a terror-related incident. It is unclear what outcome they want.”
When the story first broke last night, it was unclear whether police were dealing with one gunman or a group of individuals, but as the morning is breaking here in the U.S. it seems apparent that we’re dealing with a single lone gunman who may fit the profile of the “lone wolf” terrorist that has become unfortunately common in recent years. Some reports indicate that Australian authorities believe that they know who the gunman is but are not releasing his name to the public. They also appear to be in communication with him and he has been allowing the people being held hostage inside the cafe to communicate with the outside world via social media on at least a limited basis. Beyond that, authorities in Australia are understandably releasing very little information about what’s going on, especially as the hours tick closer to midnight and the lights in the cafe appear to largely be turned off. Notwithstanding the lack of information about this specific incident, though, there have been plenty of warning signs about potential terrorism in Australia for some time now:
The attack is eerily similar to one outlined earlier this year, when the police conducted counterterrorism raids across Sydney. The raids netted two people who were charged.
On Sept. 12, Mr. Abbott raised Australia’s terrorism alert level from medium to high after warnings from the nation’s security officials that there were increased threats to the nation.
Two weeks later, police officers in Melbourne shot dead a man — a known terror suspect — who lashed at them with a knife. Speaking to the Australian Parliament in late September, Mr. Abbott said that an Australian Islamic State operative had instructed his followers to pluck people from the street to conduct a demonstration killing. “All that would be needed to conduct such an attack is a knife, a camera phone and a victim,” Mr. Abbott said.
Mr. Abbott’s warning followed a September statement from an Islamic State spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, to Muslims in Australia to carry out a lone-wolf attack.
Mr. Abbott, who heads the conservative Liberal Party, followed up his warning with legislation giving the police broader powers to arrest suspects and cracking down on the news media’s reporting. He had also responded quickly to President Obama’s appeal several months ago for support in the fight against the Islamic State, sending a squadron of fighter jets and several hundred Australian military personnel to the Middle East. This move was criticized by some analysts in Australia as likely to foment more anger from young Australian Muslim extremists.
Tobias Feakin, a national security expert with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that “there is a lot more noise to hear when there’s a network to track,” rather than an individual acting alone. “These people are using low-level technology, and anything can present as an opportunity. Individuals leave fewer tracks.”
(…)
Australian intelligence officials have estimated that about 70 Australian citizens, typically disaffected young Muslim men from immigrant families, have joined the Islamic State. The passports of about 100 others have been canceled for fear they might do the same, they said.
The Australian Federal Police made seven arrests for terrorism offenses in the 12 months ending Oct. 31.
The United States Consulate General in Sydney, which is about a block from the cafe, was evacuated during the siege Monday. A spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Canberra said that American officials did not yet know the nationality of the people being held.
Lindt posted a statement to its Facebook page thanking people “for their thoughts and kind support.” The statement added that, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the staff and customers involved and all their friends and families,” and that the matter was being dealt with by the authorities.
The Grand Mufti of Australia, Professor Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, and the Australian National Imams Council issued a joint statement assailing “this criminal act.”
With morning breaking in the United States, the cable networks are, of course, all over the story but it doesn’t appear that anything new is likely to break in the coming hours absent a decision by the gunman to end the siege or some sort of rescue mission by Australian authorities. In any case, this post will be updated as warranted and, hopefully, the matter will be resolved quickly and safely.
Update: The Sydney Morning Herald is identifying the hostage taker as a self-proclaimed cleric who has had run-ins with the law before:
The man who continues to hold more than a dozen people hostage, placing Sydney’s CBD into lockdown is no stranger to the NSW police or the judiciary.
Self-described cleric, Man Maron Monis, 50, first came to attention of police when he penned poisonous letters to the family of dead Australian soldiers.
Last year he was charged with being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife and mother of two.
And most recently, he was charged with more than 50 allegations of indecent and sexual assault relating to time allegedly spent as a self-proclaimed “spiritual healer” who dealt with black magic at a premises in western Sydney more than a decade ago.
Monis, who has also gone by the names of Sheikh Haron and Mohammad Hassan Manteghi, was born in Iran and most recently has been living at Bexley North in Sydney’s south.
He recently likened himself on his own webpage to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, claiming the most recent charges against him have been laid for “political reasons”.
His website also carries a quote, posted earlier this month stating: “I used to be a Rafidi, but not any more. Now I am a Muslim, Alhamdu Lillah”.
It has been Monis on-going legal battle for his conviction for penning those poisoned letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers between 2007 and 2009 that has consumed him.
It is understood Monday’s incident followed an unsuccessful, last-ditch attempted in the High Court on Friday to have the charges overturned.
Monis was sentenced to 300 hours of community service and placed on a two year good behaviour bond for the “offensive and deplorable letters” sent with the assistance of his girlfriend Amirah Droudis.
They were sent to the families of Private Luke Worsley and Lance Corporal Jason Marks, who were killed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008.
He also sent a letter in 2009 to the family of the Austrade official Craig Senger, who was killed in the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2007.
Monis claimed the letters were his own version of a “flower basket” or “condolence card”.
Bree Till, widow of Sergeant Brett Till, killed while defusing a bomb on March 12, 2009, said at the time of his conviction: “We sat reading these letters (which) made out to be something supportive but then the juxtaposition of this man accusing my husband of being a child-killer while dictating how I should raise my children. It was scary,” she said.
He fought the validity of the charges all the way to the High Court arguing they were political and only sought to persuade the families to oppose Australia’s military involvement in Afghanistan.
But when he lost that battle, and had to stand trial, he pleaded guilty to all 12 charges against him in August 2013.
But his problems with the law did not end there and Monis is currently on bail in relation two separate, serious cases.
He was charged in November 2013 with being an accessory before and after the fact to the murder of his ex-wife Noleen Hayson Pal.
Ms Pal was stabbed and set alight in a Werrington apartment block.
Droudis has been charged with the murder.
And then in April this year, Monis was charged by sex crimes squad detectives with the indecent and sexual assault of a woman in western Sydney in 2002.
Police allege that Monis was a self-proclaimed “spiritual healer” who operated out of premises on Station Street at Wentworthville.
News of his arrest prompted more victims to come forward and Monis was hit with an additional 40 charges in October.
It is alleged that Monis placed ads in local newspapers offering “spiritual consultation”.
He claimed to be an expert in astrology, numerology, meditation and black magic.
So, if this is all true, this guy may be something of a nutcase who has only recently latched on to radical Islam. At the very least, there does not appear to be any connection between him and any international conspiracy.
Update #2 It sounds like the crisis may be over, based on these tweets from a reporter for Sydney’s Channel 7:
BREAKING Seven more have escaped, shots fired
— Chris Reason (@ChrisReason7) December 15, 2014
Another shot fired
— Chris Reason (@ChrisReason7) December 15, 2014
Police going in
— Chris Reason (@ChrisReason7) December 15, 2014
And News 7 itself is reporting that the siege is in fact over, although there are injuries among the hostages:
SIEGE OVER: Police confirm the siege has ended after the scene at Martin Place erupts with gunfire as hostage flee the scene #siege
— 7 News Sydney (@7NewsSydney) December 15, 2014
SIEGE UPDATE: 4 hostages look to be seriously wounded.
— 7 News Sydney (@7NewsSydney) December 15, 2014
