Sydney Hostage Siege Unfolding

[Magda Hassan]

Sydney siege aftermath: Muslims feel 'set up' over Islamic State flag request

Date January 11, 2015 - 7:50PM

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Rick Feneley

News and features writer

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Sydney Muslims attempted to help police find an Islamic State flag so the Lindt cafe gunman might free hostages, but now they feel they were "set up".

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Rebecca Kay: 'A lot of people in the Muslim community were devastated.' Photo: Dean Sewell

About 2pm on Monday, December 15, Rebecca Kay took a phone call from NSW Police Counter-Terrorism.
The officer wondered if she could help police find an Islamic State flag. This was one of the demands of Man Haron Monis, the gunman holding 18 hostages at the Lindt cafe in Martin Place.
"And if they give him a flag he was going to exchange it for a hostage," says Ms Kay, a convert to Islam who has become a prominent community member in western Sydney.
A variant of the IS flag.

Ms Kay was one of several people contacted that afternoon, and she was only too willing to help.
"A lot of people in the Muslim community were devastated," she says. "We were ready to jump 'just say how high' to help police prevent a tragedy."
Ms Kay believes she called as many as 50 people, but finding an IS flag or anyone willing to admit they had one proved no easy task.
And soon her contacts started asking: "Are we being set up?"
"They were very suspicious," she says. "Some accused me of being an informant."
But she counselled that they should try to help.
And the officer kept calling back, "three or four times over the next hour to see if I had got an Islamic State flag or not. There was a sense of urgency that I get it and that I take it down to Bankstown police station, and they were going to put it in a patrol car, with the lights [flashing], and bring it to the city."
Monis's hostages recited his demands on Facebook and YouTube, as police worked to have them taken down. Hostage Julie Taylor, a barrister, said he would free five hostages if Prime Minister Tony Abbott called him to record a short conversation to be played on air. He would release two if the politicians told "the truth, which is that this is an attack by Islamic State against Australia". And he would allow one to go if the flag were delivered.
In the end, Ms Kay says, police sourced their own flag. But then they told her it had been decided there would be no trade with Monis in any case.
By now she had burnt many bridges in her own community.
It got worse. About 2am the next morning about the time of the deadly final shootout inside the Lindt cafe NSW police searched the western Sydney home of one of the young men she had contacted. He had considered handing over his flag to Ms Kay but then thought, no, it was a trap.
"And so he then believed I did try to set him up," she says.
The next morning, she was told, the Australian Federal Police raided the homes of another two men who had been contacted during the community's urgent attempt to help save hostages.
"Obviously, they were listening to all our phone calls," Ms Kay says.
"I want to be able to have dealings with police … but when it gets thrown back in your face, it sets us back two steps."
Lawyer Zali Burrows, who represents some of the people who tried to help police, wonders: "Why didn't they just print one out." A laser printer could have produced the flag on cloth and they could have delivered it in half an hour, she says.
Lydia Shelly, a solicitor from the Muslim Legal Network, says: "Our overriding concern was with the safety of those innocent Australians being held against their will."
Police would not respond to questions about the flag or whether they intended to allow Monis to display it to the world's televisions and risk him winning the support of other extremists.
Ms Kay says there is nothing sinister about the flag that Islamic State has misappropriated. It depicts the prophet's seal and "it's a flag that Muslims should have. It's not our fault that these barbarians have taken it as their flag."
She says she would want to help police in another such crisis, but: "They're not building trust. With this incident they have not built trust at all.
"You don't understand the pressure cooker we're in and the interference that the AFP and ASIO have, and the fear that they create, and how they stalk and I can say stalk with confidence members of our community and instil fear in their families and ostracise them from their workplace and the people they know, so they become paranoid and they don't interact with anyone."
"This is the kind of norm they've created here, where no one trusts anyone anymore."
http://www.smh.com.au/national/sydney-si...2lyte.html

[David Guyatt]

What a fucking calculated, cynical thing to do. Disgraceful.

[Anthony Thorne]

"Who Was Man Haron Monis"

[URL="http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jun/05/who-was-man-haron-monis-plenty-of-intrigue-but-no-clear-answers-from-the-sydney-siege-inquest"]http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jun/05/who-was-man-haron-monis-plenty-of-intrigue-but-no-clear-answers-from-the-sydney-siege-inquest
[/URL]
The Guardian is reporting on the inquest into the Sydney siege, with additional commentary from Senior Counsel Jeremy Gormly. Gormley's area of expertise is for Commissions of Inquiry', including commissions investigating government corruption. "Jeremy Gormly has appeared in numerous Inquiries including the Seaview-CAA Royal Commission, Gretley Coal Mine Collapse Inquiry, Thredbo Landslide, Collapse of the NSW Grains Board, Stephens Police shooting, Andrew Mallard murder conviction (Western Australia), Tripodi; alleged assault at NSW Parliament (ICAC) and Inquiry into Corruption in NSW Railways, Inquest into Police road chase and associate procedures, the McGurk Tape Inquiry (ICAC) and other inquiries."

http://www.denmanchambers.com.au/barrist...-gormly-sc

The article tells us a few things.

Monis maintained multiple identities.

Monis went by more than 30 names. He would change phone numbers every two or three weeks, fearing government tracking. Some associates they were never called "friends" who testified recalled he was Egyptian. He was Romanian, others swore. In the same week he would get around as an austere cleric and a playboy who drank and drove fast cars. For a few months in 2013 he was biker too, until the Rebels declared he was "weird" and took his motorcycle. Monis has posthumously led the court through a hall of mirrors.

Monis kept a detailed paper-trail of these identities .

tracking his various incarnations had proved easier than expected. Monis had a "curious feature of administrative compliance", Gormly told the inquest. He kept fastidious records, registering his name and address changes, lodging tax returns. "The contrast between compliance and illegality is a thread that runs through most of his time in Australia," Gormly said.

Monis had income beyond his means.

A woman he dated said he lavished her with gold chains, paid for clothing, lent her one of the three cars he drove. (Each had a custom number plate: MNH001 to 003, the initials for his alias, Michael Heyson.) Iranian men he knew remembered he was often broke. "Two times he asked me to send money to his mother," one associate, Amin Khademi, said.

Gormly has no idea why Monis originally left his home country for Australia in 1996.

Gormly effectively threw his hands in the air. "It's difficult to reach any sound conclusion as to what caused Mr Monis to leave Iran," he said.

Monis felt he was under surveillance by disparate groups, and this surveillance had started when he first left Iran.

"He felt that he was being watched by various groups in Iran and in Australia, and that that had been ongoing for 14 years."

The Guardian is confident that mentions of US intelligence involvement are untrue.

Monis told fabulous lies. His statement to the immigration department in support of his bid for political protection is riddled with them. He claims to have been recruited by US intelligence on a business trip to Romania, liaising with a handler in Cyprus. "There he was given a name, secret code and a telephone number to the CIA," notes of his interview said.

In January 1996, Monis claimed he was flown to Washington, DC. "There he met high-ranking CIA officials, was invited to a number of dinner parties and was taken on sightseeing tours."

The Guardian also wants you to laugh at suggestions that Monis was a double-agent, involved with intelligence forces from his native Iran.

He also claimed to belong to the Ahmadi sect of Islam, which made him a target of Iran's secret police. You would never guess: he became a spy for them too, but told Australia's immigration department he remained a "secret follower" of the Ahmadis.

Adds The Guardian, helpfully -

"This was almost certainly a fiction he told to obtain refugee status," Gormly said.

No need to investigate links to intelligence agencies ISIS was to blame.

His spiralling downwards coincided with the rise, in Iraq and Syria, of the militant group calling itself Islamic State. Its terrorism model is low-tech, democratic. Our imaginations do most of the work. Junior counsel assisting, Sophie Callan, observed that Monis's "constant goal in life appears to have been achieving significance". Isis has made that easy. You don't even need the right flag. Only, as the Australian prime minister Tony Abbott often reminds, "a knife, an iPhone and a victim".