If the preening, smirking Sayit Erhan Akca who appeared on Four Corners on Monday night wanted us to believe he wasn’t the mastermind behind Sydney’s anti-Semitic terror blitz, he succeeded in confirming only two things: he’s not very smart and he’s not a good liar.
Four Corners convinced Akca, hiding out in Turkey, to sit down for an interview – and fair play to them, it was a good scoop.
Reporter Mahmood Fazal got an admission from the former gym-owner-turned-fugitive that he was involved in the Dural caravan bomb plot, albeit as the “interceptor” of the explosives, not the instigator.
But there were many questions left unanswered – and quite a few unasked – about Akca’s story, which was as crudely concocted as the amateur-hour caravan plot.
That’s a shame because the wave of anti-Semitic graffiti and arson attacks that struck Sydney at the end of last year, followed by the discovery of the caravan, caused real terror in the Jewish community, only to be written off by police as a nothing-to-see-here “hoax”. It was all just a ploy by a criminal to barter a deal from the authorities, the cops concluded, nothing anti-Semitic about it, folks. Except that, as The Australian revealed, Sayit Erhan Akca, was indeed a raging anti-Semite whose Facebook rants denigrating Jews and glorifying Hitler appear to have escaped the attention of NSW and federal police.
To his credit, Fazal did confront Akca with his vicious diatribes. Akca explained he was just “being young and silly”, as if he hadn’t spewed out relentless bile until at least 2022, the year before he fled the country.
It seems that after his escape via yacht to Thailand ($250,000, with a discount for “return favours”) Akca got homesick and decided to cook up a deal with the Australian Federal Police. He would offer to “get explosives off the street” in return for getting bail while awaiting trial. “I didn’t organise the caravan, I just organised the seizure of it,” Akca claimed.
“My clear instruction was – make sure this is not going to explode”, the thoughtful plotter assured us, insisting he had no idea there was a note in the caravan listing Jewish targets.
Nor did the one-time body building champion have any idea of who was behind the string of anti-Semitic graffiti and arson attacks. Indeed, he was horrified – offended! – at the suggestion.
What about the firebomb attack on a Sydney childcare centre, Fazal asked. “I’m trying to go back to see my son,” Aka replied. “Does it make sense to attack a school, a childcare and traumatise a hundred kids?”
Well, yes, if you’re a seething anti-Semite intent on stirring up fear in the Jewish community.
The jaw-dropping moment in the program came when Fazal revealed he had been in contact with Akca since 29 January this year. The fugitive sent him “an extraordinary tip that news was about to break … about the discovery of a van full of explosives targeted at Israelis”.
The ABC contacted police, Fazal said, an hour before The Daily Telegraph broke the story of the caravan discovery.
But hang on, didn’t Akca just tell Fazal he didn’t know anything about the note targeting Jews? “This is another aspect of Akca’s account where it’s difficult to pin him down”, Fazal reported solemnly. No, this was clear evidence that Akca was lying.
It’s possible that at this point Fazal demanded an explanation, but if that grilling did occur, the exchange is still lying on the cutting room floor at Four Corners HQ.
At around this point it might have been worthwhile to ask if it was just sheer coincidence that a rabid anti-Semite had organised an explosives-laden caravan with a list of Jewish targets.
But by then Akca had pretty much blown himself up.
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