IS head carver jailed for 34 years

A RADICALISED prisoner will spend decades in jail for carving an Islamic State slogan on a cellmate’s forehead after abandoning a plan for a police shooting terrorist attack.

Bourhan Hraichie, 22, pleaded guilty in the NSW Supreme Court to four offences over his long-running plan to organise a terrorist attack on Bankstown police station and causing grievous bodily harm to Michael O’Keefe with intent to murder.

He also threatened to kill NSW prisons boss Peter Severin in a letter in which he boasted about turning O’Keefe into an “IS sketchpad”.

NSW Supreme Court Justice Peter Johnson yesterday sentenced Hraichie (pictured) to a total of 34 years in jail, with a non-parole period of 29 years, for the “disturbing mix” of violent crimes.

Hraichie, who has already spent much of his adolescent and adult life in detention, made plans to shoot police at Bankstown police station in Sydney in late 2015.

But after breaching his parole and being unable to convince others to carry out his plans, Hraichie turned to terror behind bars.

In April 2016, hours after meeting new cellmate O’Keefe, Hraichie bashed the ex-soldier, tied him up with bedsheets and waterboarded him with a blanket and hot water.

O’Keefe had a short moment of respite to cough up water and fall to his knees before Hraichie grabbed a razor and carved “E 4 E” – meaning “eye for an eye” – into the victim’s forehead.

As well as writing a letter to the prisons boss in 2016 threatening to “turn your jails in slaughterhouses”, Hraichie penned an unsolicited letter to Justice Johnson this year to make clear his beliefs.

“I will always support jihad ... and I love my brothers in alQaeda,” Hraichie said.

“You are a representative of democracy, a false deity and I would never stand for (one)”.

The letter spelled out Hraichie’s support for the terror shooting of NSW police accountant Curtis Cheng and stated his only regret for the O’Keefe attack was that waterboarding and mutilation were not strictly authorised in his extreme view of Islam.

Hraichie was “firmly committed to violent jihad” and rejected the laws of Australia, Justice Johnson said. “If anything, his attitude has hardened (since 2016),” he said.

Hraichie will be aged 50 when first eligible for parole in 2047.