Tuki Lawrence pleads guilty to breaching terrorism supervision order, sharing nurse’s nude pics
A court has heard Tuki Lawrence used a secret mobile phone to circumvent strict supervision orders so he could look up pro-jihadi propaganda and receive nude pics from a student nurse.
Police & Courts
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A would-be terrorist in the community on conditional liberty used a secret mobile phone hidden from his minders to look up pro-jihadi propaganda and ogle racy nudes of his nurse girlfriend, a court has heard.
Tuki Lawrence was able to look up a plethora of Islamic extremist material, create a five-minute video discussing the Wieambilla police shootings in Queensland and make almost a thousand phone calls in December and January alone using the unapproved device, which he was banned from possessing under the terms of his terrorism extended supervision order (ESO).
Documents tendered to Parramatta Local Court said Lawrence, who was left partially paralysed in 2021 following a violent stand-off with prison guards at Goulburn’s Superman jail, also used the phone to carry out a clandestine, “intimate” relationship with a student nurse he met while a patient at the spinal ward at Prince of Wales Hospital.
The court heard the woman freely sent multiple nude photos of herself to Lawrence during his stays at the hospital in the second half of 2022.
Lawrence in turn passed the pictures onto a male nurse, without the woman’s consent, while bragging about “f—king heaps of” student nurses.
Lawrence was arrested in January this year and charged with seven counts of breaching his extended supervision order and distributing an intimate image without consent.
He pleaded guilty to the charges and faced court via video link on Wednesday from Long Bay Hospital, where he is a long-term patient.
After hearing submissions from Lawrence’s lawyer, including that he now lives in a wheelchair and has a reduced life expectancy because of his injuries, Magistrate David Price sentenced Lawrence to two years jail, with a 12-month non-parole period, after finding his offending fell around the mid-range of objective seriousness.
The decision comes the day before Lawrence is due to face the NSW Supreme Court for sentencing after he pleaded guilty to two terrorism offences related to his involvement in planning attacks on state law enforcement and military personnel.
Details of those offences are yet to be publicly released, however the Daily Telegraph can reveal Lawrence was first placed on an ESO under the Terrorism (High Risk Offenders) Act 2017 in August last year after Justice Julia Lonergan said he posed a serious danger to the community if he wasn’t under near-constant monitoring, even given his reduced mobility issues.
Court documents said Justice Lonergan found Lawrence had been assessed in the high risk category of violent offending.
“The current assessment placed Lawrence within the high range of engaging in extremist violence,” Justice Lonergan said.
“His presentation suggests the presence of an ideology that justifies the use of violence, a high degree of capacity and access, a number of relevant underlying motives and a verbalised intention to use violence.
“The combination of these factors suggests a degree of imminence of risk for religiously motiva
ted violence, violent extremism or terrorist activity.”
In relation to his ESO breaches, the court heard Lawrence also used the clandestine mobile phone to contact Goulburn prison multiple times in a bid to organise a visit to convicted terrorist Khaled Cheikho, however staff who answered the phone recognised Lawrence’s voice and denied the request.
The agreed facts said police discovered a considerable amount of extremist material when they forensically examined the phone including information about how to assemble and disassemble weapons and an article authored by well known al-Qaeda organiser Anwar al-Awaki.
The court heard police also discovered a Facebook account in the name Tuki Mohammad Karam, which contained an image of a handcuffed Lawrence being escorted by police following his arrest.
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