Large-scale terror attack in Australia: it’s a case of when

For anyone out there still believing the threat of a large-scale terror attack in Australia is overblown, you only need to look at what’s happening in the world.

Former NSW assistant police commissioner Ken “Slasher” McKay says it’s not if, but when a large-scale terror attack will occur on home soil. (Pic: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)

For any human-ostrich hybrids out there who still believe the threat of a large-scale terror attack in Australia is overblown, I prescribe a sit-down with Ken “Slasher” McKay.

The former NSW assistant police commissioner says it’s not if, but when such an attack occurs on home soil.

And he should know.

McKay was hand-picked to command the state’s inaugural Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad (MEOCS) 10 years ago, and says even then, the links between Middle Eastern crims and terrorism were too strong to ignore.

“We suspected it all along, right from the start,” McKay told me during an interview about MEOCS for last night’s A Current Affair.

“Every person has a right to be concerned.”

Former NSW assistant police commissioner Ken "Slasher" McKay. (Pic: John Appleyard)

Yet express that concern and you’re likely to find yourself on the end of a vicious bullying campaign, like my Nine colleague Sonia Kruger, who was vilified and abused in the most feral way for simply expressing her fears.

Fears, it should be noted, that echo those of the silent majority of Australians.

Kruger’s call to ban all Muslims coming into the country lacked nuance — not taking into account the fact it is many Muslims themselves who are fleeing the savagery of Islamic State and in need of refuge, or that many of those jihadis who have committed or attempted attacks in Australia were born here — but the gist of her remarks was right.

We do need to look closely at our immigration policies if we want to minimise the threat of massacres the likes of which are now plaguing France, Germany, Brussels and other European nations, countries that are only now waking up to the follies of uncontrolled mass immigration.

Germany is now in the unenviable position of having “lost” more than 130,000 migrants, which equates to 13 per cent of the 1.1 million who registered as asylum seekers last year.

To lose one migrant may be seen as misfortune, Oscar Wilde may have said if he were alive today; to lose 130,000 looks like carelessness.

The terrorist attacks of November last year in Paris left 130 people dead across, 89 of which were killed at the Bataclan. (Pic: Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images)

In Australia, McKay tells me, we haven’t “smartened up with our immigration”, either.

“We’re still bringing in customers for the police,” he says. “Without that proper risk assessment of who comes into this country, we are importing more (criminals). We’re not dealing with the ones that are here and we’re having trouble doing that.”

A decade ago, MEOCS’ targets were your run-of-the-mill gangsters, involved in firearms, drugs, prostitution and car rebirthing, among other criminal activity.

Today, they’re increasingly becoming radicalised and if they’re not planning on killing us, they’re helping those who will get the job done.

In a new book by Sunday Telegraph journalist Yoni Bashan, The Squad, another former head of MEOCS Deb Wallace says the new breed of Middle Eastern criminal is eschewing gangs for terror cells.

“What we’re seeing now is a whole group not wanting to join a gang, but wanting to join a radicalised group,” Wallace says.

Look at Man Haron Monis, an Iranian-born refugee granted asylum in Australia. After being rejected from the Rebels motorcycle gang, he took hostages in Sydney’s Lindt Café, an event that led to the deaths of two innocent Australians.

Or there’s Bassam Hamzy, one of the country’s most notorious Middle Eastern crime figures, who was jailed over the fatal shooting of a teenager outside Sydney’s Mr Goodbar nightclub in 1998. An al-Qaeda devotee, Hamzy was transferred to Lithgow prison after authorities learnt he’d been converting other inmates to his radical Islamic views.

Brother For Life leader Bassam Hamzy. (Pic: Supplied)

Then there’s Adnan Darwiche, serving life for a 2003 double murder, who told MEOCS he’d on-sold five stolen Australian Defence Force rocket launchers to Mohamed Ali Elomar, the convicted ringleader of a 2005 terror plot to blow up a Sydney target. It was a former senior member of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang that brokered the deal for the rocket launchers between former army captain Shane Della-Vedova and Darwiche.

Outlaw motorcycle gangs have been aggressively recruiting members of the Middle Eastern organised crime groups for years, due to their willingness to use violence.

Alarmingly, as many as nine rocket launchers are believed to still be out there on the streets.

But in trying to understand what motivates these criminals, be it terrorism or organised crime, McKay says you have to look at their Islamic belief system, which he calls inherently “flawed”.

He’d previously worked in the Asian crime world, where the underpinning beliefs were Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity, and found “that generational change tended to reduce the need to crime.”

However, in the Middle Eastern criminal world, sons, younger brothers and other relatives would often pick up the cudgel, meaning the problem is only growing as time goes on.

“You could speak to Middle Eastern criminals (who were born here) and really believe that this person has just come to Australia in the last couple of weeks; they maintain their old beliefs,” McKay says.

Bashan says police have told him that criminality is being passed down in these Middle Eastern crime families “like a trade skill”.

We can only hope our law enforcement agencies continue to outsmart them.

Caroline Marcus is a journalist with A Current Affair

@carolinemarcus9