Monday, November 19, 2018

How police foiled Melbourne's deadliest terror plot

Ibrahim Abbas stood smug and proud in the dock, laughing as he described how he and three accomplices tried to avoid detection while they stood at Federation Square on December 20, 2016, planning how to kill people with bombs and knives on Christmas Day.
CCTV shows dozens of people including a number of children standing nearby, oblivious, as the group tried to be secretive while discussing their plans on the steps of central Melbourne's unofficial meeting place.
During his two-week long testimony to the Supreme Court, Ibrahim — the group's ringleader — revealed his sickening plot in detail.
Ibrahim Abbas arrives at the Supreme Court.
Ibrahim Abbas arrives at the Supreme Court.Credit:Paul Jeffers
“‘Cause it’d be pretty stupid for someone to hear us talkin’ about our plans,” Abbas laughed as he described the group's visit.

“I’m just thinking how I’m gunna use my knife as efficiently as possible.”
Just weeks earlier he had pleaded guilty in Victoria's Supreme Court to his part in the Christmas Day terror plot.

Ibrahim had turned prosecution witness against the three other members of his terror cell — his younger brother Hamza, his cousin Abdullah Chaarani, and a friend, Ahmed Mohamed.

The ringleader

Ibrahim hadn’t always thought this way.

Born in East Melbourne, he was raised in the northern suburbs as a peaceful Muslim. He and Hamza attended Darul Ulum College of Victoria in Fawkner.

Their parents had migrated to Australia from Lebanon before the brothers were born. Their father worked as a taxi driver until, when Ibrahim was aged 10, he left the family unit and remarried.
During his teenage years, like many young Australians, Ibrahim identified as an atheist.

It was amid the slow, agonising death of his uncle in 2012 that he says he questioned his beliefs.
He was catapulted “straight into the deep end” of Islamic radicalisation, aged 19, when a cousin introduced him to Islamic State and al-Qaeda material.

When Ibrahim started practising Islam again, it was immediately as a jihadi ideology.
By the time of his arrest by heavily-armed police inside his Campbellfield home on December 22,

2016, Ibrahim was an Islamic State fanatic in the grip of blinding extremism.

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