Court orders big payout after Hong Kong assault Melbourne car attack not terrorism, say police
Australian police said there was no evidence of a terrorist link to a car ramming attack yesterday in central Melbourne that injured 19 people.
Police said the driver was a 32-year-old Australian citizen of Afghan decent who has a history of drug use and mental health issues.
The man was known to police for previous minor assault and traffic offences.
“We don’t at this time have any evidence or any intelligence to indicate there’s a connection with terrorism,” said Victoria state police’s acting commissioner, Shane Patton.
The streets outside the city’s Flinders Street railway station were crowded with Christmas shoppers when a white Suzuki SUV ran a red light and speeded up to slam into pedestrians crossing the road before crashing into a traffic barrier.
While police said that 14 people had been injured, Victo- ria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, confirmed that 19 people had been taken to hospital. The four listed in critical condition are believed to include a preschool-aged child.
Mr Andrews described the incident as “an act of evil and an act of cowardice, perpetrated against innocent bystanders”.
“I was crossing Flinders Street on the way to the train station. I heard an engine rev behind me and heard a thump,” a man told a local broadcaster. He said he saw “people literally getting thrown into the air as it hit them”.
Bystanders rushed to drag the driver out of the vehicle before police arrived to arrest the man.
The attack was being treated as a singular incident, Mr Patton said. He said police were working with Australian intelligence agency Asio and with Australian federal police, and that there was no intelligence to suggest the man was a person of interest to those bodies. A Hong Kong woman jailed for six years for starving and beating her domestic helper was yesterday ordered by a court to pay more than Dh367,000 in damages. Law Wan-tung was convicted in 2015 and is still serving her jail sentence. The plight of her former helper, Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, 23, from Indonesia, spurred a movement seeking change for Hong Kong’s 340,000 domestic helpers, mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia. They often work for low wages while living in poor conditions. Ms Sulistyaningsih lived for months on bread and rice, slept only four hours a day and was even knocked unconscious. She was admitted to hospital in Indonesia in 2014, emaciated and in critical condition, sparking international outrage.