Terrorist Abdul Nacer Benbrika’s continuing detention order is being reviewed

Australia’s most dangerous terrorist, Abdul Nacer Benbrika, will appear in court, as authorities review the continuing detention order which is keeping him in jail.

Exclusive: Australia’s most dangerous terrorist, Abdul Nacer Benbrika, will appear in court on Thursday, as authorities review the continuing detention order which is keeping him in jail despite him completing his 15-year jail term.

The automatic review of his order, the first of its kind handed down in Australia, comes months after Benbrika lost two legal appeals against his continuing detention order, which will run for a period of three years.

The Algerian-born cleric, who was the spiritual leader of terror cells in Melbourne and Sydney which were busted in 2004 plotting terror attacks on sites in Victoria and New South Wales, has been deemed too dangerous to be released, despite him completing his jail term a year ago.

Muslim cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika. Picture: News Corp Australia

As a high-risk terrorist offender, he must spend the next three years behind bars, while undergoing yearly reviews, the first of which is listed in Victoria’s Supreme Court on Thursday.

Last week, the Algerian Embassy in Canberra refused to say whether it would revoke Benbrika’s Algerian citizenship.

The Australian Government revoked Benbrika’s Australian citizenship in 2020, making him the first terrorist to lose his citizenship while on Australian soil. He is now on an ex-citizen visa, meaning he cannot return to Australia if he is deported after he is eventually released from jail.

However, national security agencies and police are concerned about the former Melbourne spiritual leader’s capacity to influence and radicalise other Islamic extremists if he was free to return to Algeria.

Abdul Nacer Benbrika (aka Abu Bakr) during an interview with the ABC.

Algeria is considering laws which would allow it for the first time to revoke citizenship of those it considers a threat to the national interest. The amendment to nationality laws would also apply to those who joined, financed or “glorified’’ a terrorist organisation.

Benbrika, who supported the Islamist terror group al-Qaeda, was arrested in 2005 with a dozen other men in Sydney and Melbourne after police uncovered two terror cells plotting attacks on home soil and amassing a cache of weapons and explosives

Other members of the group included the infamous Islamic State jihadi Khaled Sharrouf, from Sydney, who was later killed in Syria.

A known supporter of al-Qaeda’s then-leader Osama bin Laden, Benbrika, who also called himself Abu Bakr, was the main target of the police investigation known as Operation Pendennis, then Australia’s largest counter-terrorism investigation.