A madman, a sawn-off shotgun and 18 hostages: How a killer terrorised my city for 17 hours

There was a stroke of evil genius in the way Man Haron Monis secured a worldwide audience for the horrific events that he unleashed in the heart of Sydney on a fine summer’s day 10 years ago.

The Lindt chocolate cafe, on the corner of Martin Place, sat directly across from what was then Network Seven’s TV studios, adjacent to one of Sydney’s busiest pedestrian precincts. Wall-to-wall coverage was virtually guaranteed.

I first got wind of the attack when a worried friend phoned to say another friend’s son, a waiter at the cafe, was trapped inside by a gunman.

I immediately switched on the TV to see images of the stricken hostages, standing in the windows with hands raised as their captor prowled unseen behind them.

It had been 8.33am on December 15, 2014, when Iranian-born Monis walked purposefully up Martin Place and pushed through the cafe doors, taking a seat and calmly ordering tea. An hour later, he’d drawn a sawn-off shotgun from his backpack, trapping 18 customers and staff and forcing 34-year-old cafe manager Tori Johnson to declare (by way of a call to triple zero) that this was an Islamic State attack on Australia. Monis also claimed to be carrying a bomb in his backpack, and that two more were planted around the city.

It was an attack on a scale the country had never previously experienced. Hostages’ lives were under imminent threat, entire city blocks were plunged into lockdown and thousands of office workers began evacuating under police guard from surrounding buildings. The collective shock was profound. As I wrote later in my book, Siege: Inside the Lindt Cafe, “Lindt ripped away Sydney’s sense that ‘it couldn’t happen here’” .

For nearly 17 excruciating hours, the siege dragged on. During that time, a dozen hostages managed to engineer their own escape, increasingly enraging Monis. At 2.06am, he forced Tori to his knees. Seven minutes later, he cold-bloodedly executed the young man, triggering a police emergency entry. Thirty-eight-year-old barrister Katrina Dawson was fatally injured in those final seconds, felled by lethal fragments from a police bullet.

As someone with a background in defence and security reporting, I’d watched the denouement with alarm. The cafe was rocked by a cacophony of gunfire (police firing 22 times) and dozens of explosions from stun grenades (or “stunnies”, as the police called them). This entry seemed chaotic – nothing like the kind of clinically executed exercise one would have expected from an elite tactical unit.

Political leaders had reassured the country early on that police were well equipped and well trained. Then NSW police commissioner Andrew Scipione proclaimed his negotiators to be the “very best in the world”. Yet when a coronial inquest began in earnest five months later, the multiple failures of management started to become clearer.

Just a few examples: police negotiators never managed to make direct contact with Monis despite their billing as the world’s “best”. Communication between different commanders was inexplicably poor. Vital snippets of intelligence never seemed to make their way up the line to senior officers making the key decisions. Police consistently misread the mood inside the cafe, not recognising in the final hour of the siege that the gunman, far from “settling” down for the night as several commanders and the police psychiatrist believed, was growing increasingly agitated.

A dozen hostages managed to engineer their own escape, which increasingly enraged the gunman.Credit: Reuters

What caused particular distress afterwards to the Dawson and Johnson families was that Monis, a self-proclaimed Islamic cleric, should never have been at liberty. He was facing grave charges of being an accessory to murder and perpetrating a raft of sexual assaults, he’d publicly declared fealty a month earlier to the Islamic State Caliphate, and no less than 18 warning calls had been made about him to the national security hotline in the days immediately before the siege. Yet authorities had left him at large.

Equally galling to the families and former hostages was the revelation that police commanders had never signed off on what in counterterrorism doctrine is known as a deliberate action plan, or DA – which might have allowed an earlier, more controlled and potentially more propitious entry. Commanders would tell the inquest they believed Monis’ false assertion that he had a bomb and that this constrained their choices. Yet it was odd that they did not search his flat – seeking any sign of access to bomb-making equipment or expertise – until 11 that night, some 14 hours into the siege.

The possibilities of help from the army (which had lethally trained commandos stationed at Holsworthy) and of specialist surveillance equipment from ASIO were not fully explored. Indeed, a formal submission from the NSW police to the coronial inquiry contained the revealing assertion that “the commonwealth, the ADF … should not intrude [my emphasis] by way of direct or formal substantive involvement” unless the state felt the situation was out of control.

Thankfully, the idea that cumbersome bureaucratic gears have to be engaged before action can be launched appears to have been laid to rest. NSW deputy police commissioner Dave Hudson, who describes the siege as “a defining moment in our city’s history”, says lessons from Lindt have been vital in overhauling preparation for terrorist attacks, ensuring the force is “now more ‘forward leaning’” . This was evidenced by the extraordinary resourcefulness of Inspector Amy Scott in April this year, when she single-handedly shot and killed the Bondi Junction Westfield knife attacker after he’d slaughtered six people.

Under changed laws, a sniper would no longer have to wait for permission from higher up to take a shot if the opportunity presented itself – unlike the situation at the time of the siege. All officers now complete Active Armed Offender (AAO) training. The skill set of police negotiators has been upgraded and the threshold for Defence involvement in a terrorist attack has been lowered.

But as the Dawson family told me this week, what will most count in any future attack is a proactive mindset on the part of police, and what they felt was most lacking on the night – “leadership courage”.

The loss of Tori and Katrina to their families was incalculable. So many others have also suffered in long-lasting ways, particularly the surviving hostages (a number of whom will carry a psychological injury for the rest of their lives) and first responders.

Photos of siege victims Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson amid a sea of flowers outside the Lindt cafe.Credit: Photographic

Mike Baird, then the state’s premier, wept on Nine’s 60 minutes two weeks ago as he talked about the devastating impact the siege had on him.

Louisa Hope and her elderly mother Robin, since deceased, were forced to stand each side of Monis as he shot Tori. The siege has left Louisa with a disabling shrapnel wound to her foot that has yet to heal. Some eight years after the attack she began suffering from violent, intrusive thoughts at night, requiring fresh rounds of therapy. She continues to believe the inquest was too narrow: “It suited most of the main players not to have a bigger inquiry.”

She has recently joined Caroline O’Hare, a former officer in the NSW police counterterrorism squad, to co-found a new organisation called Victims of Terrorism Australia. O’Hare hopes VOTA will ensure that “victim-centric” thinking will be at the forefront of those managing a terrorism event and its aftermath in any future attacks.

Many of the tactical officers on the front line that night have been left traumatised. Criticism of the way the siege unfolded is in no way to question their bravery.

“Officer A”, who shot and killed Monis, continues to struggle with deep guilt over Katrina’s death, even though it will never be known if he or another officer’s gun fired the bullet that ricocheted and fatally injured her. Only recently has he been able to speak publicly and under his own name – Ben Besant – about PTSD, after a court lifted a long-standing suppression order on his identity.

How to mark this 10th anniversary has presented something of a dilemma for authorities. Public commemoration of anniversaries can be healing for the community and for some victims, but exquisitely painful for others.

Baird told this masthead the way the public covered Martin Place with a sea of bouquets in the days after the siege was a moment of “deep connectedness, unlike anything I had experienced before or after”.

Louisa has given dozens of speeches about her Lindt experience over the years, raising money for nurses and briefing counterterrorism experts. Another former hostage tells me he’s moved on to a new life and wants nothing to do with commemorations. Others I contacted for the book have not renewed that contact.

The Dawson family made clear to the state government they didn’t want an ostentatious public event to mark the anniversary. Instead, they honour Katrina’s life with a scholarship set up in her name at her alma mater, Sydney University Womens’ College. Tori’s mother, Rosemary Connellan, was planning her own private ceremony.

Premier Chris Minns, along with a handful of dignitaries, is expected to lay flowers in a low-key fashion in Martin Place on Monday. The anxiety felt by the Jewish community after the recent firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue and graffiti attacks in Sydney will no doubt be weighing on his mind.

These days, the Lindt cafe is no more, replaced by an upmarket liquor store. But the aftermath showed communities can knit themselves together after the collective psychic shock of a terrorist attack – with the right leadership. That’s a lesson, hopefully, we won’t forget.

Deborah Snow is the author of Siege: Inside the Lindt Cafe (Allen and Unwin) published in 2018.

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