Officer tells of the moment teenage terrorist Numan Haider attacked
IN 77 seconds it was over. One man was dead, but another saved from certain death. This is how the shooting of Melbourne terrorist Numan Haider unfolded, told for the first time by the man that shot him.
Law & Order
Don't miss out on the headlines from Law & Order. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A POLICEMAN who fired a single fatal shot at terrorist Numan Haider to save his partner from the crazed teenager’s savage knife attack says he will never forget it.
Chilling details of the encounter outside Endeavour Hills Police Station on September 23, 2014, are revealed in an interview with the Police Association Victoria’s Journal, provided in advance to the Herald Sun.
INQUEST FINDING INTO THE DEATH OF RADICALISED TEEN NUMAN HAIDER
Officer A, and an Australian Federal Police agent, Officer B, met Haider, 18, outside the police station.
Asked to turn out his pockets, the teen caught the duo by surprise.
Haider lunged at Officer A with a knife before turning on Officer B, stabbing him in the chest, narrowly missing his heart.
Haider, who days earlier had been seen carrying an Islamic flag at Dandenong Plaza shopping centre, had arrived early to the meeting with the Joint Counter Terrorism Team officers outside the station.
This is how the shooting of Melbourne terrorist Numan Haider unfolded, told for the first time by the man that shot him:
OFFICER A’s life changed course in 77 chaotic seconds.
As he stood, gun drawn, over the lifeless body of teenage terrorist Numan Haider, his movements were mechanical, governed by years of physical and practical training.
His mind, though, was still his. It raced from thought to thought.
His first thought was for his partner. He called out to Officer B to make sure he had survived the frenzied stabbing attack that had led Officer A to fire a single, fatal shot into 18-year old Haider.
Officer B had suffered five stab wounds, one came within a centimetre of his heart, and each had penetrated deep, such was the force and surprise with which Haider had launched his attack just metres from the Endeavour Hills police station.
His second thought was for the process. He ordered a young constable who arrived on scene first to get some crime scene tape to preserve the scene as his detective training dictated. As a local resident approached, he asked them to get a blanket to cover the body from public view.
His third was for his partner at home. He asked a trusted colleague to call them with the reassurance that he was OK, knowing they would soon be greeted by a sight that would set their own mind into fearful overdrive — two police officers, neither of them the one expected home that night, lobbing at the front door without warning.
His final thought was for himself.
As he sat in the back of an ambulance, a paramedic asked him whether the stab wounds to his left hand and arm were the only ones he had suffered. Officer A had a flash of panic as he wondered briefly whether adrenaline had masked the pain of a more serious injury. Fortunately, it hadn’t.
It wasn’t until the initial procession of visitors to his hospital room, mainly top brass from Victoria Police and the AFP, had left that Officer A was able to regain some clarity of mind, and the flurry of thoughts were replaced by one:
“I’ve got to equate for taking a man’s life, for saving a man’s life,” he recalls thinking.
Officer A was due to be rotated out of the Joint Counter Terrorism Team in a month’s time.
In the two and a half years he had spent there, he and his team had investigated suspected terrorists and terrorism plots that were considered significant and imminent, but Numan Haider hadn’t done anything to fit into either category.
READ MORE: OFFICER TO SUE OVER HAIDER ATTACK
He had no criminal history, a caring and law-abiding family and what appeared to be a fleeting, albeit consuming interest in the extremist group ISIS.
In mid-late September 2014, the terror alert in Australia had been raised to high in the wake on an IS-issued fatwa calling for attacks on the government, military and police in several western nations including Australia.
Haider had come to the attention of police the previous week, when he was spotted at Dandenong Plaza shopping centre waving a shahada flag.
“Numan had made a comment to our members at Dandenong Plaza that he wasn’t there to blow up the shopping centre that day, but he would in the future and that our government would be sorry,”Officer A recalled.
He posed enough of a threat for officers to act
In the days that followed, Haider was monitored as he conducted online searches on the Holsworthy Army Base, how to make firecrackers detonators, and most concerningly, the movements of then Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
It was decided that the public display of fanaticism and the online research of potential targets
posed enough of a threat, in combination, to enact a plan of interruption.
“We looked at it as potentially disrupting some type of plot against the Prime Minister,” Officer A said.
“There were three objectives, to disrupt any activity, to make ourselves known to him and to let him know that he was being monitored by police, and to gather information and intelligence.”
Officer A and his colleague Officer B, an Australian Federal Police officer who had been with the unit for just three weeks, went to Haider’s family home on the evening of September
23, 2014 to discuss his behaviour.
Haider wasn’t there, he was away with a group of friends, including Sevdet Besim, who would later be convicted and jailed over a plot to behead a police officer in an Anzac Day attack.
READ MORE: COURT TOLD OF SHOCKING ATTACK ON OFFICERS
“The family were just really nice, caring. Mum and dad and a couple of brothers spoke of a young man who had fallen off the wagon so to speak over recent months and had been associating with the wrong people.”
“It was obvious to us that he had been keeping parts of his life secret from his family. We had a look in his bedroom to see if we could find the shahada flag that he had been seen waving around the Dandenong Plaza but we couldn’t find it.”
“We needed to have a chat”
As the two officers returned to Endeavour Hills police station to debrief with their colleagues,
Officers C and D, a decision was made to contact Haider directly.
“The thought, by confronting him and showing our hand, was that his behaviour would de-escalate once he knew he was being monitored.”
“At about 6.45pm, I placed a phone call to Numan, we knew he was in Hallam at the time. The decision was made that I should be the one to call him rather than be on the cover team, because I had had the most interaction with the family that afternoon.”
“I phoned Numan, introduced myself, said I was from the police and that we needed to have a chat about the Dandenong flag waving incident. He was a little bit stand offish on the phone and said he wasn’t comfortable meeting with us at the moment and would phone us back.
“Around 15 minutes later, he phoned back and told us he was at Hungry Jack’s in Hallam and asked if we could come there and speak to him. Because he was there with about three other friends at the time, and because it wasn’t a secure location, it wasn’t a consideration to go there and meet him.
“He phoned back a short time later and said ‘I don’t want to meet with you inside the police station … I’ll go with you to the police station, but I don’t want to go inside’ — I made it clear he was under no obligation to speak with us and he could leave at any time.”
“I’m thinking that I’m in no man’s land here”
Haider told Officer A he would be there in 15 minutes. As the JCTT team began to plan how Officers A and B would approach and handle the informal meeting, Haider caught them off-guard by arriving within seven minutes.
Unpredictability can be a terrorist’s greatest weapon, as it can’t be identified or neutralised in the moment.
Officer A details the next 77 seconds in the present tense. Three years on, it still plays out in his mind in real time.
“I walked out with officer B, I’ve got my day book with me so I can take notes of the conversation.
His car is parked about 30 metres away from the entrance to the police station and he’s sitting on the bonnet of the car. I call out his name, he looks up and begins slowly walking towards me.
“The way he’s walking isn’t alarming, it’s not a quick pace with intent, just a slow amble, but one thing that concerns me is that he has his right hand in his right jacket pocket and his left hand is down beside him. When I walk, I’ve either got both of my hands in my pocket, or both hands out, so I’m thinking that’s a bit off.”
Complicating the situation was the fact that Haider was not under arrest, there was no power to arrest him, and the power he had to search him was arguable at best.
“I’m thinking that I’m in no man’s land here, the only intelligence we have about him in regards to a weapon is for possessing a knife, and that information is over a month old.”
“I’m thinking to myself ‘how am I going to see what’s in his pocket without breaking this rapport that I’m trying to build?’, so from a distance I extend my right hand to shake his.
“He sees that and he takes his right hand out of his right pocket and we shake hands. I introduce myself and ask him if he’s happy to speak here. He says yes, so we walk over to his car, I put my day book on his car bonnet and say to him ‘I’m going to search you now to make sure you’ve got nothing on you’.
“Irrespective of whether legislation says I have the power to do it, I’m certainly not going to
jeopardise my safety or that of my colleague by not searching him.”
It was an instinctive decision. A life saving one.
“He turns around as if he’s going to comply and put his hands on the bonnet of the car. Officer B is looking in the back window of the car to make sure there’s no one else inside, while I move in to make the search.”
“I’m just about to place my hands on him when Numan turns around very quickly and the first thing I feel is his right hand with a knife in it striking into my forearm. So, for me, the brain and the body are working at two different speeds. The brain is saying ‘this is not good, get out of here, move back’ and the body is trying to respond to the stimulus and the fear.”
“I can see the silver glint of the knife coming out of my forearm.”
“As quick as a flash, he’s thrust it at me again, all I can do is throw my left hand onto the knife, which cut me across the wrist. The first stab cuts into the ulnar nerve and stops the feeling and movement within the hand, so my hand is just forced wide open, I can’t grip anything. I move backwards trying to gain distance to use a tactical option on him and I fall over straight away and my first action is to cover my firearm, in case he’s trying to get that.”
“Numan then walks straight past me. My partner at this stage has seen something in the corner of his eye and then he’s been stabbed straight through the chest, missing his heart by a centimetre.”
“I can hear a ferocious struggle unfolding. I roll over to try to lift myself off the ground, my partner yells out ‘knife’.
“I roll over and I can see officer B is moving backwards to try to get away from Numan who is walking straight in front of him, stabbing him repeatedly. Officer B goes straight to the ground, trying to kick him away so he can draw his gun.
“I’m about four and a half metres away and I yell out a challenge to Numan that I’m going to act, but Numan is frenzied in the way he’s laying into my partner, it’s the most brutal thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Officer B is lying on his back looking up, his left hand up to fend off the knife from his chest, and his right hand is on his holster, trying to draw his firearm, so it’s a crystal clear decision for me that today is a gun day, and I have two options, shoot at the legs or the head, so I unclip the firearm and fire a reactive shot at Numan’s head, which kills him instantly.”
“He falls down beside my partner and I yell out to my partner ‘Are you okay’ and he replies ‘yeah, mate’ and the sense of relief that comes over me is overwhelming.”
In 77 seconds it was over.
One man was dead, another man was saved and a third man was
responsible for both.
“The brutality of the attack on my partner, those few seconds, will never leave me,” Officer A says.
“Since that day, it’s been a constant focus on dealing with what is the new normal for me.”
The ‘new normal’ carries a physical and psychological legacy; a hand that will never function as it should and once did, and a mind that, without constant work, could suffer a similar dysfunction.
“I’ve got to constantly think about and work on my relationships with my family and my colleagues to maintain that balance in my life. Looking after my physical and mental health is a constant now.”
He says a key aspect of his psychological recovery was the support he received in the hours that followed the shooting.
“As I sat in my hospital bed, I was thinking about two things. What does my organisation think of me for what I’ve done and what does the public think?”
The organisational support was immediate and effusive, with high ranking representatives from both Victoria Police and the AFP visiting Officer A in hospital.
Support from his colleagues was just as strong.
“My phone went nuts with missed calls and messages of support from people I had worked with throughout my career. It was really humbling. I would be lying in my hospital bed crying reading these messages because it was just validation of who we are as police members and as people.”
But it was a simple gesture the following morning that told Officer A that the public was also behind him.
“When I woke on the Wednesday, there was some flowers in my room that had been dropped off by a member of the public, signed by a woman named Karen. She thanked me for what I had done and to me, that was just so reassuring and comforting.”
Officer A would send Christmas cards to Karen and the dozens of other wellwishers who sent both he and Officer B letters of appreciation in the days after the incident.
He signed each of them ‘from a grateful detective’.
The greatest validation though was the moving reunion with Officer B in The Alfred Hospital almost a week later.
“That was really emotional seeing him for the first time, and meeting his family. I remember hugging and sharing a few tears with his family.”
“We’re now very close mates, I owe my life to him as well.”
“For him to be able to wrestle with Numan for that long and give me time to get my firearm helped to save us both.”
For a man he only knew for 77 seconds, Officer A habitually refers to his would-be killer as ‘Numan’, which seems to humanise him in a way that ‘Haider’ or even ‘Numan Haider’, as he’s often referred to, does not.
He says he holds no hatred for him, but doesn’t mourn his loss.
Officer A is matter-of- fact about the brief time, on September 23, 2014, when their lives crossed and only his continued.
“It was a planned ambush. He was there to kill us, he had the ideology to do it and the capabilities, and he paid the price for his hatred and intolerance.”
First published in Police Association Victoria’s Journal.