How ASIO agents tried to recruit terror plot accused Ali Khalif Shire Ali

Ali Khalif Shire Ali had finished university classes for the day when a curious message popped up on his phone.

Ali Khalif Shire Ali is taken into custody after his arrest on Monday. Picture: Mark Stewart

Ali Khalif Shire Ali had finished university classes for the day and was waiting for a train at Glen­ferrie station in suburban Melbourne when a curious message popped up on his mobile phone.

“Look left,’’ it read.

Ali looked nervously along the platform and saw, a few metres away, the familiar face of an ASIO agent staring right back at him.

It was a surreal moment. Ali would later say he felt like he’d been thrown into the middle of a James Bond movie.

This was no fantasy. Instead, it began a two-year sequence of events that yesterday culminated in the 20-year-old son of Somalian refugees being charged with planning a murderous terror ­attack in the heart of Melbourne.

Ali recalled his dealings with ASIO at a Muslim community forum held a month after radicalised teenager Farhad Khalil Mohammed Jabar shot dead accountant Curtis Cheng outside Sydney’s Parramatta Police Station in October 2015. The forum, titled Government Intervention in the Muslim Community, staged under the provocative banner “Innocent until proven Muslim’’, was organised with the support of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a hardline Islamist group banned in some countries but tolerated in Australia. Ali said ASIO at first came to his family home in Werribee, in Melbourne’s west, when his parents weren’t home. Then they repeatedly called him when he was in class at Swinburne University, on the other side of town.

Ali Khalif Shire Ali is arrested. Picture: Jessica Karasmani

Eventually, he agreed to meet them at a Nandos chicken shop near his parents’ house. First they asked him about where he worked.

“Then they start to get to the real questions like who are you friends with, what are your thoughts about ISIS, what are your thoughts about those groups.’’

Ali said he stayed quiet, hoping they would go away. They eventually left but continued calling.

On the day the agent ­approached Ali on the railway platform, he came armed with a very different offer.

The agent told Ali he knew that he was well connected in the Islamic community and had friends of interest to ASIO, including people with knowledge about Cheng’s shooting. He asked him to provide information.

According to Ali, the agent ­offered to pay him $200 every time they met. “I said to them I don’t want to talk to you either way, it’s haram,’’ Ali told the forum. “I know you guys want me to be an informant. It’s haram, it’s kuffar. Just get lost.’’

The Australian understands that Ali has remained under surveillance ever since. Police and sec­urity agencies, at first worried at the company he kept, began ­noticing an alarming pattern of behaviour that would coincide with major terrorist incidents around the world. This year, as they watched Ali ever more closely, their concerns dramatically heightened.

Within Melbourne’s close ­Somali community, news of Ali’s arrest came as a shock. His family is well known and his parents are well liked. Warsame Hassan, the owner of a computer and mobile phone repair store in “Little ­Africa’’, a cluster of shops and cafes behind a pedestrian mall in Footscray, said he gave Ali a part-time job as a favour to his father, who shares the same name. The plan was for Ali to resume his university studies next year.

“He was a quiet guy. He was just a casual. He just came in to learn something,” Mr Hassan said. “I know his dad, we live in the same place in Werribee, that’s how I know the family. They are absolutely lovely.”

Ali at the 2015 Muslim community forum.

Just before 3pm on Monday, the AFP knocked on Mr Hassan’s door. They closed his shop and seized a computer. Next to Mr Hassan’s store, Berhan Ahmed keeps a small, upstairs office.

Mr Ahmed is an African community leader who arrived in Melbourne as an Eritrean refugee. He is a research fellow at Melbourne University and chief executive of the African Australian Multicultural Employment Youth Services, a new not-for-profit group that helps young ­African immigrants find work.

He said he occasionally prayed with Ali at a prayer room near his office and never detected anything amiss. “To be honest, I was flabbergasted when I heard the story with him being watched for over a year,’’ Mr Ahmed told The Australian. “I have never seen any of that impulse in him.

“The boy is quite an Aussie boy. That is part of the question. Why is this happening?’’

Mr Ahmed welcomed the police action to foil what they alleged was a planned terror attack. “Public safety is of paramount importance,’’ he said. Yet he questioned why security agencies allowed Ali to reach this point without seeking community help.

“We need to be involved,’’ he said. “Rather than reaching this ultimate state of crisis, we need to deal with it at an early stage.

“If I had known this problem, my office is open. It would have been helpful if we had that sort of communication.’’

The Virgin Mary Majid mosque. Picture: David Caird

Ali’s father is a retired cab driver. He and his wife fled Somalia and came to Australia before Ali was born. They raised their family in a red-brick home in a quiet ­avenue, with a large park and football ground at the end of the street. When Khalif Shire Ali spoke to The Australian, he proclaimed his son’s innocence. “If you knew that man (his son), you don’t believe it,” he said.

The family prays at the Werribee Islamic Centre in Hoppers Crossing. The imam is the highly respected Sheikh Isse Musse, who preaches a moderate brand of Islam. He renamed his mosque the Virgin Mary Majid to promote harmony between Muslims and Christians.

When young Melbourne Somali men were radicalised by Al-Shabaab sympathisers 10 years ago, they were taken away from Sheikh Musse’s teachings and exposed to hateful sermons at 8 Black, a now defunct prayer centre that used to hold clandestine meetings in a disused pool hall in Flemington.

Police and intelligence agencies believe that Ali’s alleged radicalisation has less to do with the Somalian community than a multi­-ethnic network of Muslim extremists across Melbourne. When he spoke at the 2015 community forum, he swapped stories with other Muslims who’d had dealings with counter-terrorism police. In some instances, they’d seen family members jailed for terrorist crimes.