Terrorists cross a thinning blue line as third person arrested in caravan terror plot

Senior police are privately warning the strain of escalating anti-Semitic violence and other crimes will leave officers with ‘one hand tied behind their backs’, as a third person was revealed to be in custody over the caravan plot.

NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb, right, Tammie Farrugia and Scott Marshall, bottom left, and their Liverpool apartment in Sydney’s southwest, top left.

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Senior police are privately warning the strain of escalating anti-Semitic violence and other crimes including domestic violence will leave officers with “one hand tied behind their backs” unless severe under-­resourcing is fixed, as a third person now alleged to be “on the periphery” of the caravan terror plot was revealed to be in custody.

With public safety and crime emerging as a top-tier voter issue in Australia amid the anti-Semitism crisis, the Police Federation of Australia is preparing a ­national election campaign targeting marginal seats demanding more resources from federal and state governments.

The campaign, which will be discussed by senior officials in Canberra next week, will push key issues including the retention of police and soaring attrition rates, salary sacrificing for mortgages, army-style blue cards for fast-tracked medical treatment and access to super under the banner of “retirement with dignity”.

A police source close to the campaign said “we simply do not have the capability to do the job at the standard expected by the community, we don’t have the ­resources out on the streets”.

Fears over the ability of officers to handle the wave of anti-Jewish hate came as police said they believed the spate of anti-­Semitic attacks in NSW, including the discovery of explosives in a caravan dumped on a Dural roadside in northwest Sydney, was “orchestrated” by as-yet unidentified ­figures.

The Australian understands 39-year-old Simon Lance Nichols was arrested on January 2 by ­Organised Crime Squad officers over eight allegedly stolen vehicles that were said to have been fixed with cloned plates, with officers allegedly discovering jerry cans with fuel inside some, unrelated to the caravan incident.

The Viscount Grand Tourer caravan was packed with enough Powergel explosives to create a 40m blast and also contained a note with addresses of Jewish people and a synagogue.

With 7000 of 65,000 police jobs currently vacant, including more than 2000 in NSW, senior police sources on Thursday warned that a “powder keg was about to explode”.

“What we are seeing now has been brewing for a long time,” one source said. “Every police force across the country is under-resourced, with one hand tied behind their back. Police officers are doing multiple jobs and spread too thin. We’re not getting the same intel from community sources. That day-to-day, on-the-ground intelligence is not where it should be … There will be no quick fix to ending these anti-Semitic incidents.

“If there aren’t enough NSW police officers … how can they proactively patrol Jewish community infrastructure?”

The biggest challenge facing investigators is cracking encrypted communications being used by offenders, including those linked to anti-Semitic crimes.

Requests for assistance accessing encrypted communications are typically made from state police to the AFP. Investigators are actively exploring overseas links with anti-Semitic incidents in Australia and criminals being paid to carry-out attacks.

While there has been historic friction between the AFP and NSW Police, there is daily contact ­between investigators. Relations with Victoria Police are strong, with the AFP called in immediately after the Adass Israel Synagogue firebombing.

While security agencies are exploring different lines of inquiry, there have been cases of Iran and Russia being linked to anti-­Semitic incidents in Europe, including the hiring of Hells ­Angels bikies in Germany, and Russian intelligence officers blamed for anti-Semitic graffiti in France.

On Thursday NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb defended withholding the discovery of the caravan for more than a week as necessary for the purposes of the investigation.

She said the discovery’s premature leak to the media on Wednesday had “compromised our investigation and been detrimental to some of the strategies we may have used”.

However, The Daily Telegraph, which broke the story, said senior NSW police had been contacted by the masthead offering to not run the story if it would compromise the investigation.

Jewish leaders lamented that they’d been left in the dark until reading of the caravan in media reports, saying the need for “clandestine investigations” needed to be balanced against the right of the public to know. “When people are kept in the dark, they jump to all sorts of conclusions and they speculate, and that just encourages the very panic that the perpetrators are trying to create,” Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Peter Wertheim said.

NSW Premier Chris Minns defended police handling of the incident, saying it was a “serious police clandestine investigation” and that there was a need for detectives to pursue inquiries sometimes out of the public eye.

While Mr Minns labelled the incident as “terrorism”, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess refrained on Thursday from lifting the nation’s terror threat level, which had already been lifted from “possible” to “probable” in mid-2024 after “anticipated spikes in politically motivated ­violence”. “We have seen a disturbing escalation in the targeting of Jewish interests, and a disturbing escalation in the severity and recklessness of the targeting,” Mr Burgess said.

“The security environment has evolved almost exactly as we expected,” he said, adding that the threat level was the same as during the height of the Islamic State.

All three of the alleged “peripheral” actors in the caravan investigation, including the vehicle’s owner, remain in police custody after unrelated arrests.

Two of those are believed to be dog breeder and reptile trader Tammie Farrugia, 34, and partner Scott Marshall, 36, who had allegedly spruiked they were “looking for a caravan” on social media.

A Facebook post made by Tammie Farrugia on 6 December 2024.

Farrugia was charged in January over her alleged involvement in Woollahra’s second anti-Semitic vandalism attack last year, although neither she nor Marshall – arrested for unrelated weapons offences – have been charged in relation to the caravan incident. Nor has Nichols.

On December 6, Farrugia allegedly wrote on Facebook that she was “looking for a caravan”, encouraging people to “hit me up” if they had one for sale – a day before police believe the caravan appeared in Dural.

Speaking in Dural on Thursday, resident Robert, who declined to give his last name, alleged that police arrived at a property he owns with a search warrant referencing Farrugia and Marshall. Nichols, 39, was also listed on that search warrant.

The caravan investigation has passed from NSW Police’s Strike Force to the Joint Counter Terrorism Team, but it has not been designated as a terror incident.

Investigators are also probing whether the caravan was not intended to reach its “targets” but could instead have been abandoned for police to find. No detonator was found in the caravan.

Tammie Farrugia and Scott Marshall’s Liverpool apartment on Thursday.

NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Dave Hudson said it appeared increasingly likely that there was “co-ordination and orchestration” between some of the anti-Semitic attacks. “We believe that some of (the attacks) are being orchestrated by others,” he said. “We have identified links between certain jobs, which gives us some indication there is a level of co-ordination above those perpetrating the offences.”