Fawkner mosque firebombers fail appeal bid
The first Australians to stage a terrorist attack on home soil have failed in their bid to overturn their convictions. Abdullah Chaarani, Ahmed Mohamed and Hatim Moukhaiber set a Fawkner mosque alight in 2016, and faced court again today.
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Three terrorists who claimed they had an “unfair” trial have failed in their bid to overturn their convictions over a Melbourne mosque firebombing attack.
Abdullah Chaarani and Ahmed Mohamed were both jailed for 22 years, and Hatim Moukhaiber for 16 years, after setting fire to the Imam Ali Islamic Centre in Fawkner in 2016.
They were the first Australians to be convicted for committing a completed terrorist act on local soil.
But the trio tried to argue in the Court of Appeal that the trial judge made an error when not allowing the jury to consider an alternative charge of arson.
Their legal teams submitted the judge’s failure to leave in the offence of arson rendered the trial “fundamentally unfair”.
Chaarani and Moukhaiber also argued the unavailability of arson as an alternative was a substantial miscarriage of justice.
Chaarani admitted destroying the mosque but had tried to argue it was not an act of terror because Victorian legislation provided for legitimate acts of “advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action”.
He was prepared to plead guilty to arson, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years, as opposed to life imprisonment for engaging or attempting to engage in a terrorist act.
Court of Appeal judges Phillip Priest, Stephen Kaye and Terence Forrest said neither ground could be upheld.
The fact the jury found the men carried out the attack to “strike a blow against, and terrorise, Shia Muslims” meant that it was terror-related and not arson, they said.
“The jury must have been satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the applicants were complicit in setting fire to the mosque, causing it serious damage, and that they did so intending to advance a political, religious or ideological cause and to intimidate the public or a section of the public,” the appeal judges found.
Chaarani and Mohamed are also serving a 26-year jail term over a Christmas Day 2016 plot to behead people and set off bombs in Melbourne’s CBD.
They were ordered to serve 16 years of that term cumulatively with the 22-year firebombing sentence.
With their appeal refused, their non-parole period of 28 years and six months remains.
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