How police missed chance to get Curtis Cheng’s killer
RABAN Alou has been jailed for 33 years for his role in the murder of Curtis Cheng. But the AFP had been watching him, and had a chance to move in.
Opinion
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FOR anyone who thinks the judiciary too sympathetic to offenders, the sentencing remarks of NSW Supreme Court Justice Peter Johnson, who on Thursday put Raban Alou away for a minimum 33 years for supplying the gun that killed Curtis Cheng, can take comfort.
Yet hanging in the periphery of the judge’s uncompromising sentence are the phantoms of the Australian Federal Police, who had Alou under blanket surveillance in the lead-up to Cheng’s execution.
The decision of the AFP to stand back, even though they were monitoring real-time conversations between Alou and others, and used drones to observe a meeting in which Alou received the revolver, appears the result of a tragic — if understandable — misjudgment.
The unrepentant Alou, now 20, supplied a revolver to Farhad Mohammad, 15, who was shot dead after murdering Cheng, 58, a NSW Police Force civilian accountant, nearby the Parramatta police station on October 2, 2015.
Said the judge: “Both the offender (Alou) and Farhad Mohammad were radicalised supporters of the so-called Islamic State, a fanatical terrorist organisation which specialises in the infliction of human misery and death for all who do not agree with its poisonous and criminal views.”
MORE: Curtis Cheng’s widow reveals her harrowing victims’ impact statement
At the time, the AFP knew almost nothing about Farhad and his sister, Shadi Mohammad, 21, who is heavily blamed for her brother’s radicalisation. She flew out to Turkey the day before the killing, fully aware of what was to happen. She was not stopped from leaving because she wasn’t in their sights.
But they knew plenty about Alou, having fitted a listening device in his vehicle.
Alou was on a menacing pro-ISIS Whatsapp forum that was being monitored, and they knew Alou had been trying (unsuccessfully) to get someone to make him an Islamic State flag, which he no doubt wanted to display at the scene of an attack.
They were also aware Alou was reaching out trying to obtain a gun. He and others — including Talal Alameddine, 25, who had been subject to a firearms prohibition order — were in regular discussion. It was clear an event was imminent.
On October 1, the day before the murder, Alou was busy on Whatsapp exchanging radical messages, as well as pushing hard to source a gun.
On the morning of October 2, Alou was heard telling his wife Sharna Perger (they had married recently in an Islamic ceremony but did not live together): “It’s got to be done”; and “whatever I do [Allah] will accept it”.
At 1.36pm on the day of the murder, surveillance officers heard Alameddine — who has pleaded guilty to supplying Alou with the gun and is currently facing sentence — telling Alou in a phone conversation: “I brang the 30 cal bro”.
Alou and Alameddine met, engaged in conversations and over the next 15 minutes or so were observed in a number of switches, perhaps designed to throw off surveillance, but which the judge said “involved the supply of the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver”.
Alou was also heard at this time talking to another (unnamed) person on the phone. The transcript is messy but the key part reads: “You know I told you when he’s going to ‘thing’, did I tell you where [indistinct]. But it will affect, the brother, Parra, affect the masjid [mosque], mine, it will affect me…”
With the handover of the revolver, and this monitored conversation suggesting something was imminent, it might have been time for the authorities to move.
However, they held back.
At 3.05pm, Alou met Farhad and others at the Parramatta Mosque, where they prayed and talked. At 3.48pm, Alou went to his car, got the gun and handed it to Farhad in the female prayer room.
It is understood from someone close to the case that the handover of the gun by was not observed by the AFP, but only gleaned in hindsight from CCTV footage.
Farhad then walked the short distance from the mosque to police HQ and killed Cheng.
The surveillance officers knew Alou was in possession of a weapon but, given his activities, it is possible to speculate what happened: they thought Alou himself was to conduct an attack, and were ready to jump on him should he make a move.
What they didn’t know was that Alou — along with Farhad’s sister Shadi, later killed in a drone strike in Syria — had been indoctrinating Farhad to kill a police officer.
On the morning of the murder, Alou spent two hours in the mosque talking in Farhad’s ear, preparing him to kill and be killed.
The judge said that Alou was “prepared to exploit a young person as the perpetrator of a terrorist act in the knowledge that it was planned to kill a person or persons in the street, and that there was every prospect that Farhad Mohammad himself would die, as indeed happened.”
And he had words for Alou’s accomplice, the dead Shadi, saying decent people would struggle “to understand the twisted and evil minds at work where a 21-year-old woman is prepared to have her 15-year-old brother commit a homicidal atrocity in the likely knowledge that he would be captured or die in the process.
“Acts and thoughts of this type are the antithesis of civilised religious beliefs in a modern democratic society such as Australia.”