Omar Baladjam: TV actor turned terrorist walks free from jail

An actor who was arrested and convicted as part of Australia’s largest terrorism operation is a free man after serving over 18 years.

Actor Omar Baladjam in a 1997 episode of the TV show Wildside. Picture: Supplied

The bit-part TV actor turned terrorist Bradley Umar Sariff (Omar) Baladjam has walked out of jail a free man and won’t be subjected to any ongoing monitoring by authorities after serving an 18-year and eight month prison sentence.

Baladjam, who was arrested and convicted as part of Australia’s largest terrorism operation known as Pendennis, was released from the Geoffrey Pearce Minimum Security prison in Sydney’s northwest on Sunday.

There are no control or supervision orders in place and as he has served his entire sentence to the day, he also won’t be subjected to parole conditions.

Omar Baladjam at age 19. Picture: Supplied.

During Operation Pendennis weapons were seized from various house. Picture: NSW Police

The former actor, who had small roles in the soap opera Home and Away and the ABC’s Wildside, is expected to start his new life running a tiny-house building company which was registered on his behalf while he was still behind bars.

When Baladjam last appeared before the NSW State Parole Authority, the authority was told the former actor and house painter had changed and wanted to become “functioning member of society”.

Baladjam who was married and had four children at the time of his arrest wanted it known that he had made “positive progress” during his time behind bars.

Baladjam is now 47 years old and when last seen in a video hearing at the SPA he had a small goatee and his hair parted in the middle and slicked back in a ponytail.

He looked like a different man to one arrested in dramatic scenes for his part in the Pendennis plot and for shooting a police officer. He was shot in the neck during the 2005 arrest suffered complications from his injuries.

Operation Pendennis involved smashing two terrorist cells in Melbourne and Sydney plotting to carry out attacks on Australian soil. Eighteen men in Melbourne and Sydney were convicted.

Police keep a gun trained on Omar Baladjam while a colleague checks his condition after police shot him on Wilson Road in Green Valley, southwestern Sydney, when he opened fire on them during a counter-terrorism raid.

During his jail time, Baladjam was initially classified as an extremely high risk restricted (EHRR) prisoner, held in the Super Max at Goulburn, Australia’s toughest jail within a jail.

In a 2019 appeal against the harsh conditions of his incarceration, lawyers for Baladjam revealed he had not had any access to therapy for his injuries while in the Supermax.

A shotgun, pipe bomb and ammunition recovered from a raid during Operation Pendennis in November, 2005.

But in recent years he was considered to be a low risk and reclassified as a C2 prisoner.

He has been in a minimum security prison in western Sydney for at least the past two years where inmates are allowed a lot more freedoms.

Those freedoms have included being part of a day-release program working on community service projects such as mowing grass, cleaning up public spaces and attending self-improvement courses.

During his time in jail he has also studied permaculture and undertook building and construction courses.

Baladjam pleaded guilty in 2008 and was given a 14-year minimum sentence for four Commonwealth charges relating to making preparations for a terrorist act.

At the time the sentencing judge gave him a 15 per cent discount on his sentence for co-operating with authorities.

In a separate trial in 2012, Baladjam was convicted on a state charge and given an extra 18 months for discharging a firearm in public and possession of an unlicensed firearm.

Five years later a report about Baladjam’s psychological state said he was no longer vulnerable to influences of faith or ideology.

Baladjam has been eligible for parole since 2020 but the Commonwealth Parole Board has refused him three times, the last time in April last year.

But the fate of his parole release was split between the Federal Attorney-General and the NSW State Parole Authority because he was convicted and sentenced for both federal and state crimes – and if one refuses parole, it cancelled out the other.

He appeared before the NSW Parole Authority last year but Justice James Wood declined to make an order for or against parole, saying it was purely “academic” because the Commonwealth had already declined his release.

Originally published as Omar Baladjam: TV actor turned terrorist walks free from jail