Second teen guilty of Sydney bayonet terrorist plot
After two trials, a second teenage boy has been found guilty of preparing to carry out a gruesome terrorist attack in the name of Islamic State. The full details can only now be revealed.
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Two schoolboys walked up to a Sydney gun store with an Islamic State call-to-arms ringing in their heads, ‘Kill disbelievers on the streets of Brunswick, Broadmeadows, Bankstown, and Bondi”.
Their attack was imminent but the full details can only now be revealed, more than three years later, after a jury found the second boy guilty.
The boys, identified only by the initials AB and XY, were just 16 when they bought two knives from a Bankstown gun shop in October 2016.
XY told the cashier he was going “pig hunting” when he returned to buy two more knives - this time serrated M9 bayonets. “Pigs” meant police.
XY had left his phone at home to go undetected by authorities but had posted “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved” online a day earlier.
Neither XY or AB, who was waiting outside, knew undercover officers were in the store watching them. The schoolboys then headed to an Islamic prayer hall nearby.
A judge would later conclude it was a “significant” location because it was near Bankstown Court House and the police station — XY considered Australia’s governments “evil”.
That’s where the police swooped.
They found the knives inside AB’s backpack and the boys had a note swearing allegiance to the caliphate.
The pair faced trial in mid-2018 and Justice Geoffrey Bellew was told XY had downloaded two issues of the Islamic State’s magazine Rumiyah.
“The first issue contained an article which urged readers to ‘kill disbelievers on the streets of Brunswick, Broadmeadows, Bankstown, and Bondi …. [and] at the MCG, the SCG, the Opera House and even in their backyards’ and to ‘stab them, shoot them, poison them and run them down with your vehicles’,” the judge found.
Another article described how to carry out a successful knife attack and the court found XY had followed it with “meticulous precision” and the attack was “imminent”.
AB’s barrister, in the first trial, told the jury there was nothing in his search history in the months leading up to his arrest pointing to support for ISIS.
His internet search history included UFC and pornography and school work.
The trial heard that AB had been detained in Egypt for a month after trying to escape a family holiday to join Islamic militants in the Sinai region.
His lawyers said he denounced ISIS as a hate group when questioned by ASIO.
XY was found guilty in September 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison but the jury couldn’t reach a verdict on AB and he was ordered to face trial again.
AB, now 19, was indicted before the NSW Supreme Court again in February this year on one charge of jointly preparing for a terrorist act involving “bladed weapons”.
The jury found him guilty on Tuesday and the NSW Supreme Court released Justice Bellew’s judgment from the first trial shortly after.
AB will be sentenced at a later date and faces a maximum term of life imprisonment.
The matter will return for an administrative hearing in May.
XY will be eligible for parole in 2028.