THE LINDT CAFE SIEGE A new book uncovers what really went on in Martin Place.

A terror trap, lives lost and a plan that went catastrophically wrong

In the early hours of Dec. 16, 2014, police stormed the Lindt Chocolate Café in Sydney’s Martin Place to prevent more terror and carnage from lone gunman Man Haron Monis, who had held 18 customers and staff hostage during a 16-hour siege. By the time the raid ended with Monis dead, he had executed café manager Tori Johnson, and lawyer Katrina Dawson was killed by a police bullet ricochet. Sydney Morning Herald senior writer Deborah Snow watched the events and was compelled to investigate. “When I saw the police entry, I thought it looked messy, surprisingly so,” she tells WHO. “It sparked my interest into why and what really went on.” Interviewing some of the hostages, their families and politicians, compiling police statements, trawling through hundreds of pages that made up the coroner’s report, and attending key inquest sessions, Snow gathered all her reporting and wrote Siege, her thorough examination of that fateful event. Here is an edited extract. Prime Minister Tony Abbott had a bad feeling about the Sydney siege from the outset. Gathered around the cabinet table in Canberra with him that Monday morning were a number of the senior ministers who made up the government’s National Security Committee. Aside from the PM, this group normally comprised the deputy PM, the foreign minister, the attorney-general, the immigration minister, the treasurer and the defence minister. With them in the Cabinet Room were the SCONS—THE Secretaries Committee on National Security—made up of the heads of those departments. The unscheduled meeting had been on the point of winding up when Abbott decided to keep everyone in place to hear from the NSW authorities. “We got the police commissioner and the premier on the line and were briefed by them, and I offered one observation,” Abbott told me, “which was that this will end badly because this guy is obviously out to make a political point. He had taken hostages, he’d barricaded the café and he’d put up an Islamist flag. Well, that meant it was plainly a terrorist incident.”

The prime minister was keenly aware of the wider international backdrop to the siege. Just six months previously the leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-baghdadi, had declared himself the head of a caliphate, a fundamentalist religious state harkening back to the early days of Islam. From this base, al-baghdadi had urged Muslims to join him and “make jihad” for the

“This will end badly. This guy is out to make a point” —Tony Abbott

sake of Allah. As recently as September 2014, IS leaders had issued a fresh call to supporters around the world to kill kuffar (the plural of kafir, meaning “infidels”) wherever they could target them, with specific mention of Australia. And two months prior to the siege, Canberra had raised the national terrorist alert level from medium to high on the advice of the nation’s domestic spy agency, ASIO. The head of ASIO, David Irvine, had specifically warned of the risk posed by “loners,” as well as more orchestrated attacks.

In Abbott’s mind there was no doubt about the need for urgency in resolving the Lindt Café crisis [and] says he offered to make military capabilities, including Sydney-based Special Forces soldiers, available almost immediately. “The Commonwealth wanted to be as helpful as we humanly could be,” he told me. “In Afghanistan they did this stuff all the time.”

The response from [Police Commissioner Andrew] Scipione and [Premier Mike] Baird was polite but pro forma. “I’m not sure they ever put [that] in so many words. It was more look, ‘Thanks very much, we’ll let you know what we need,’ ” Abbott said. The PM’S chief of staff, Peta Credlin, formed a similar impression: “The premier said they didn’t need it at that stage and thanked the prime minister for the offer.”

Baird does not recall a specific offer of military aid. He told me: “It was just an update of events, what we were facing. It was part of the protocols to touch base with the PM. There was nothing in the conversation that the Commonwealth had this and this, that [they] were ready to deploy. The context was more, ‘Anything we can do, let us know.’ ” However, according to Abbott’s national security adviser, Andrew Shearer, Abbott did offer every support, including Australian Defence Force (ADF) assistance. “It was very clear that the Commonwealth would provide absolutely any support that was required,” Shearer told me, “and implicitly understood that would include most obviously elements from TAG-EAST.” Abbott remained worried. He decided to cancel the Liberal Party fundraiser he was due to attend in Sydney that night and wait the siege out in Canberra. If the New South Wales government changed its mind about the need for federal assistance, he wanted to be sure he was in the right place to get things moving.

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