Terrorist Man Monis should never have been given a visa into Australia.

He also should never have been granted Australian citizenship in 2004.

COPS’ FURY AT LINDT SIEGE INQUEST ‘WITCH HUNT’

And he should never have been free on bail one decade later in 2014 after he was charged with ordering his girlfriend to brutally murder his wife.

Barrister and mother-of-three Katrina Dawson and cafe manager Tori Johnson would be alive today had immigration officials, prosecutors and magistrates simply done their jobs.

This fake sheik got away with rape and murder and played Australians for fools.

Monis exploited the weaknesses of our bail laws as frustrated police could find no-one to stand up for them and fight to keep him locked up.

Tragically, it was the police who were left to pick up the pieces when this narcissistic psychopath looking for infamy walked into the popular Martin Place cafe early on December 15 in 2014 armed with a knife, an old sawn-off shotgun and the sense of entitlement that had been nurtured since he arrived in the country from his native Iran.

Sydney — and Australia — would never be the same.

The Lindt siege tragedy has been burned into our minds. It’s impossible to walk through the CBD without thinking of those fateful events and how it unfolded live.

Yet many are still in the dark on the intricate details of the day, and what led up to it. Monis got hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars through the Asylum Seeker Assistance Scheme, Newstart, Austudy and eight grants of legal aid funding — which even paid for an appeal to the High Court that was a total waste of time.

In 1999, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation declared him a threat to national security. One year later ASIO changed its mind.

In 2002, it put him on the Movement Alert List — for non-citizens who are of concern for character or other reasons.

Two years later ASIO backflipped again and gave him a “favourable assessment”. This meant he was given citizenship. In 2008, ASIO investigated Monis after he sent them a DVD of a “fatwa”.

Then, eight months later, ASIO found he was no security concern.

In a final insult to the 18 people held hostage by Monis in the Lindt Cafe, ASIO concluded he posed no terrorist threat despite 18 calls to the National Security Hotline between December 9-12.

Three days later the eyes of the world would be focused on Martin Place.

Before the cafe staff and patrons realised evil was in their midst, police were already on their way to the cafe.

The first call went out four minutes and eight seconds after Johnson was forced to dial triple-0.

Our nation stopped in collective horror as the scenes unfolded on our TV screens, social media feeds and news websites.

The centre of Sydney was shut down as Monis threatened he had a bomb in his backpack and claimed other bombs were planted around the city. He demanded to talk to the prime minister.

At the same time, years of counter-terrorism training kicked in.

Command posts were set up, snipers took their positions, negotiators moved in and the Tactical Operations Unit officers raced to the cafe wearing one third of their weight in body armour.

Monis was declared a lone wolf terrorist radicalised by religious ideas formulated by Islamic State.

Seventeen hours later almost nothing had changed. The negotiators had not been able to speak directly to him.

The snipers couldn’t shoot because their ammunition would not have penetrated the glass in the building where the officers were positioned.

Even if they could have taken Monis out, they were not legally able to shoot because even in the extraordinary circumstances of a terrorist incident, they were bound by the ordinary rules of policing — which meant they could not fire unless life was in imminent danger.

After 17 hours, there were still six terrified hostages trapped in the cafe with a madman who claimed to have a bomb in his backpack.

The crack TOU operatives, still standing where they had been in the heat all day and night without respite, were itching to storm the cafe and “shoot the c***”.

But in a major stuff-up, a so-called deliberate action plan, under which the TOU could enter the cafe at a time of their choosing while all the hostages were alive, was never approved.

It meant they were backed into a corner that beggars belief. All they could do was wait for a hostage to be executed.

And as day had turned to night, then police commissioner Andrew Scipione and his deputy in charge of counter-terrorism, Cath Burn, left. While neither had a direct role in the operation, they went home as the siege was still playing out.

The final 10 minutes of the country’s first terrorist siege would also be a disaster of radio failures, miscommunications and lack of direction.

Johnson was shot by Monis. Dawson died after being hit by fragments of police bullets as she hid beneath a chair.

Over the road in the old Supreme Court building, their families were not officially told who had been killed. They worked it out for themselves when their loved ones never came out.

With the findings of the inquest into the siege imminent, rarely has the task of the state coroner been so onerous

As the man being looked to for answers, NSW Coroner Michael Barnes said the terrifying possibility that a similar terrorist event could occur at any time had spurred them on because it was “imperative if any mistakes made by the authorities were to be avoided or improvements affected”.

No one should ever forget those 17 hours and the mistakes that led to them. It must never happen like this again

• Chapter 2: ‘The country is under attack’
• Chapter 3: The race to name a terrorist madman
• Chapter 4: The gunman and his hostages
• Chapter 5: Dead calm and then a storm
• Chapter 6: Staring death in the eyes