Hostage drama in Sydney.
Black flag with Arabic lettering seen in window
SYDNEY — Three hostages escaped from a Sydney café where a man was holding people at gunpoint as a more than six-hour standoff with armed police continued Monday.
Television images showed three people, one wearing an apron, fleeing from the Lindt café in Martin Place before taking shelter behind a line of police officers clad in riot gear and wielding automatic weapons.
An undisclosed number of people were still being held and police were trying to establish the motive for the hostage-taking, New South Wales state Deputy Police Commissioner Catherine Burn told reporters.
Networks earlier showed hostages pressed up against a window of the café, holding up a black flag with white Arabic lettering.
“As long as nobody gets hurt we want to resolve this peacefully,” Burn said, adding police negotiators had made contact with the gunman.
Four hours after the incident erupted inside the café, New South Wales state Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said police did not know the gunman’s motivation.
“We have not yet confirmed it is a terrorism-related event,” Scipione said. “We’re dealing with a hostage situation with an armed offender and we are dealing with it accordingly.”
The hostage-taking brought much of Sydney’s central business district to a standstill Monday and saw the local currency fall, as the nation’s biggest banks closed branches in the city and the government delayed its mid-year economic outlook announcement.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose government raised Australia’s terrorism alert to the highest level in a decade in September, convened cabinet’s national security committee and urged people to remain calm.
“We don’t know whether this is politically motivated although obviously there are some indications that it could be,” Abbott told reporters.
There were probably around 10 staff in the café when the gunman entered Monday morning, said Lindt Australia chief executive Steve Loane, whose office is about one kilometre away.
“I was in our office, one of my staff walked in and said, ‘There’s a holdup at the café,’” Loane said. Around 30 customers are typically in the premises at that time of the morning, he said.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other Canadian officials were closely watching the situation. “Canada’s thoughts and prayers are with our Australian friends,” Harper tweeted.
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird tweeted that he was in touch with his Australian counterpart Julie Bishop. “We continue to monitor the situation in Sydney closely,” Baird tweeted. The situation in Australia came a month and a half after Harper and Baird were at the centre of a crisis that gripped Ottawa, where a gunman killed a soldier and then stormed the Parliament Buildings before being gunned down by security.
Clive Williams, a former military intelligence officer, said the flag draped in the café’s window appeared to be a Shahada, which is used by some Islamic State followers though isn’t the group’s official insignia.
The “low-tech, high-impact operation is consistent with what Islamic State has been urging its supporters to do,” Williams said in a phone interview.